Simon and Torsten, I have a bit of mixed feeling about this "termination" of BCEL development. Our product mBooster (www.innaworks.com/mBooster.html) makes use of BCEL as its input/output adapter. When we started work on mBooster, ASM was not mature enough. We had our share of minor issues with BCEL, but on the whole it served us well.
Sections of BCEL are extremely buggy: The verifier is a joke if you are serious about specification compliance. Someone else mentioned repository. The Jasmin converter generates incorrect code. CCK has one of the worse UI ever, and has some insidious corruption bugs as well. We have not relied on the support on the mailing list, as we had not particularly found it useful. We have occasionally submitted bug patches, but again we found the committers generally not too interested. However as a user I would not like to see BCEL terminated. I still think there are classes of applications that would be suitable for BCEL but not for ASM. mBooster is one of them. In general BCEL is stable, and does what it needs to do. It is unlikely we need to add new features to BCEL, aside from keeping up with JVM specification update. So my suggestion is to: 1. Keep BCEL alive 2. Strip out/remove the parts that are useless/very buggy 3. Fill in remaining functionality that we need to add - I can't think of much really For your interest, you might like to know mBooster is the first commercial J2ME bytecode optimizer implementing a full blown SSA compiler framework and advanced optimization technologies. Kind regards, Stephen -----Original Message----- From: Simon Kitching [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, 19 May 2005 2:42 p.m. To: BCEL Developers List Subject: Re: proposal to post deprecation notice on BCEL webpage On Thu, 2005-05-19 at 11:51 +1000, Torsten Curdt wrote: > > Given the nearly universal opinion expressed in the recent email thread > > titled "comparison between BCEL and ASM": > > http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=bcel-dev&m=111149200909727&w=2 > > I think it would be a good idea to update the BCEL welcome page to note > > that while BCEL will continue to be maintained, new users are encouraged > > to use ASM. > > ...only bugfixing the last release? Probably. Not *necessarily*, but it depends upon developers stepping up to do stuff. Right now, we have a tiny bit of your time, and a tiny bit of Dave's time. That's the entire development commitment. And I can't see anybody else stepping up, as ASM is already better than BCEL - why would anyone want to waste time improving BCEL? I can see minor fixes going in from existing BCEL users, as projects that already use BCEL strike problems. But if a BCEL-using project wants *major* new features, it is probably easier for them to move to using ASM than to fix BCEL. And no-one is going to fix BCEL for them. So I feel that letting people believe that BCEL will have any kind of future significant development is just misleading them unless you know something I don't. > > > Are there any objections to me doing this? If I don't hear any within > > the next 3 days I will make this change to the website. > > Hm... that's quite a big thing. > We should do a vote on that. Ok, fair enough. > > Maybe it would be worth also > asking on bcel-user what they > think about that. Well, their opinion is irrelevant unless they volunteer to do significant development on BCEL, or are willing to provide funds to hire someone to do BCEL development. See my comment re developer time above. I guess we could do a "wake up" call on the user list to see if anyone is actually motivated enough to become a BCEL developer.. > > I personally would like to play > a bit with ASM before casting > my vote. Please do. There's no hurry on this, so I'll wait until you've made up your mind before calling a vote. Will you be able to do this within the next 2 weeks? Regards, Simon --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
