To the Japhar and GNU Classpath communities, and to other interested parties,
It is with a heavy heart that I write this message. This change became
official two days ago, and I must inform all of you of it.
To start off, I am going to paraphrase something Paul Fisher said a week or
so ago on the GNU Classpath list:
"Happy hackers always work better than those forced to write code for
someone else."
This is not to say that my work on the optimization issues for Japhar was
being forced upon me. However, this work was to comprise my Master's
thesis, and the choice of topic was a compromise with my advisor (i.e., not
my first choice).
Last week, I attended the Perl Conference 2.0. This reminded me of a topic
I long hoped to pursue, but I thought that Larry Wall was working on: A
Perl to JVM compiler. I found out that Larry is, in fact, not working this
project.
My advisor hates Perl, which is why I never even asked Larry before. My
advisor was not enthusiastic about the idea altogether. But, being at the
Perl conference reminded me that I am, in fact, really a Perl hacker, not a
Java hacker.
Finally, after much convincing, I sold my advisor on the new idea. He isn't
completely happy, but I am not at the best of graduate schools (major
understatement!) and, well, students can get away with more here than they
could at "big name" schools.
In contrast, I *do* believe that free Java is very important, and that JVM
is important as a platform (indeed, I wouldn't take on a Perl -> JVM
compiler if I didn't think JVM was important)!
However, this change in my priorities sadly means that I must stop work on
the optimizations for Japhar. In some ways, this is no real loss. I was
still researching the theoretical parts of the work (and I can send a long
list of papers to read on optimizations for OO languages to anyone who asks
:), so I hadn't coded anything at all. If anything, I was dragging. :)
I realize though, that because others thought I was working on this, they
might have ignored the issue all together, waiting for my work. If time was
lost because of that, I humbly apologize.
I will stay on the Japhar list, of course, because my interest in Java as
free software remains strong. In a year, when my thesis is complete, if no
one has implemented any optimizations for Japhar, I may go in and poke
around. :)
But, for now, I must declare myself off the project.
I hope I have inconvenienced no one. I apologize to all involved. Keep up
the good work!
--
- [EMAIL PROTECTED] - Bradley M. Kuhn - [EMAIL PROTECTED] -
http://www.ebb.org/bkuhn
