On 15 Sep 1998, Paul Fisher wrote:
> Sean McDirmid <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> > Background: I'm a newcomer to the classpath mailing list.
> Welcome.
Thanks!
> I'd think you'd rather want to use _anything_ besides Sun's class
> libraries. :) Anyhow, thanks very much for making Ghost GPL'd.
Ya, well, I've learned that things can work better that way.
> The good thing is that you'll have the source to GNU Classpath, so you
> can easily rip out all the i18n support. I assume you'd want Ghost to
> fully support the PersonalJava API, so it seems like it would be best
> if GNU Classpath could be compiled for just PersonalJava support. Of
> course j.l.Character must be fully supported under PersonalJava, so I
> suppose we might work up a better implementation for storing the
> Unicode attribute database -- by adding traditional compression, for
> example. The current size is around 20k.
Whenever you store a constant array in a class file you take a really big
hit. To represent an array of bytes, for example, can take up to 7 bytes
in code, so a 100 byte array winds up being 700 bytes in the <clinit>
method. For small constant arrays, this is not a problem, but for a class
like java.lang.Character and internationalization stuff in java.text, this
is a really BIG problem. Better to store these tables in resource files
somehow and have a nice API to initialize arrays using resource files.
> Oh, and if you are planning to go in the PersonalJava API direction,
> we'd be glad to add the PersonalJava Timer API to our distribution.
I'm not sure if PersonalJava is the way to go, it is really just a large
subset of DesktopJava. It will not even incorporate 1.2 features
automatically. I was thinking about a new standard that was more realistic
for the devices I'm looking at, like MobileJava.
Anyways, when I have time, I'll review some of the classpath code to look
at viability. I'm actually working on other numerous Java projects (at the
University of Utah), all of which center around core virtual machine
technology. I would like to reuse off the shelf classes if I could
(otherwise I'll start cranking out my own libraries, and probably
duplicate alot of work).
Thanks!
Sean
