Suddenly out of the blue, nothing was getting compiled in our project using ant and jikes. When we would do a clean build of all our class files, the build directory would be created, but when the javac task was invoked (build.compiler="jikes") nothing would happen. We removed the build.compiler property so the standard javac would be used and everything worked just fine.
After confusion and floundering we took a guess that perhaps there was a physical limit to the number of files that could be compiled by jikes. We started deleting files and found that we could compile at a maximum 383 files and nothing more. If we added one more file up to 384 files, jikes would appearantly error and not compile a single file in our tree. I'm assuming this is a limitation of the fact that jikes gets invoked by exec'ing a process through the command shell and perhaps NT doesn't like 300+ arguments to a command? Our machines have 384megs of memory, which I'm assuming is a funny coincidence between the number of files that can/can't be compiled. Has anyone seen this? We've replicated it on a few machines here in our development environment... Any thoughts on a work around? The ugly option is to re-write the Jikes task to split up the file list and arguments into multiple commands so this limit doesn't get hit. My less ugly option is to switch to JDK 1.3's new "fast" compiler but is not really what I want to do. Thanks Mike McCune
