On 7/12/05, Tim Ellison <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Geir Magnusson Jr. wrote: > > > > On Jul 11, 2005, at 12:14 PM, Tim Ellison wrote: > > > >> Recently, within IBM, we have been defining the interface between IBM's > >> class library and the J9 VM. We deliberately haven't looked at the GNU > >> Classpath/VM interface specification.
A few of us at Intel have also done something similar. That is, we created a simple, easy to understand Classpath/VM interface. We also did not look at GNU Classpath because of its license. Hopefully Harmony licensing issues will get resolved soon so that actual code containing interfaces can be donated to Apache. This will make pulling the best ideas from each version of VM/Classlib interface into Apache Harmony much easier > >> The principal goals are to enable the class libraries to be hosted on > >> different versions of a virtual machine, and potentially different > >> virtual machines, without sacrificing performance or introducing > >> complexity. Yes these are the correct goals and it is fairly straight forward to achieve them. I connected GNU Classpath to ORP several years back. My experience indicates that moving between Harmony Class Classpath and GNU Classpath should not be that much engineering effort. In other words, it's not really worth debating. > As I said before, there are other VM-specific classes that are entirely > the responsibility of the VM developer (e.g. Class, Thread, etc.) and > these are covered by regular Java API specifications. > > A few classes are predominantly common (i.e. reusable) code. VM > developers can choose to either implement the entire class, or pick up > the common code and implement one or two methods to complete them (e.g. > AccessController, and String). > > Regards, > Tim > This basically matches our experience in the interface between the VM and the classpath. Again, this interface is one probably one of the easiest interfaces to change in a modular JVM. The idea of a generic common code implementation that can be replaced by a vm specific implementation is classic software engineering practice. It's a good idea, not new and should be used in the Classpath/VM interface.
