Hi all, After playing a bit with the just announced native eclipse build from the gcj hackers it is clear that they have won the fast free eclipse prize! Below is the official announcement. Please feel free to distribute this to anyone that might be interested since I really think this is a huge accomplishment.. Thanks everybody. It was a exciting race!
Cheers, Mark
gcj Eclipse team wins Fast Free Eclipse Prize Andrew Haley and Tom Tromey led a team of gcj (GNU Compiler for Java) hackers at Red Hat who won the Fast Free Eclipse prize. The Fast Free Eclipse challenge was to produce a free and fast version of the Eclipse development environment that would run on a completely Free Software system like GNU/Linux. Tom and Andrew not only accomplished all the goals of the original challenge, but they went far beyond that to produce the fasted Eclipse based development environment to date. This accomplishment means that the Free Software movement now has another high productivity environment for creating software that can be freely used, modified and distributed. The Eclipse platform is a graphical IDE for anything and nothing in particular. It supports creating highly integrated tools (plugins) for development activities such as code management, source code viewing, editing, refactoring and debugging. Eclipse itself is written in the java programming language and is most famous for its excellent tools for manipulation of large projects. Eclipse is distributed under a Free Software license (the Common Public License) and its development is organized as a Open Source project where both individuals and large companies share their development efforts. Despite being distributed under a Free Software license, Eclipse didn't work on a free software platform or (like other projects developed for a java like environment) integrate very well with a traditional GNU system. So the original challenge to win the Fast Free Eclipse prize was just to get Eclipse to start up under one minute on a completely free system given some standard hardware. Late last year this seemed a lot of work given the modest goal of just getting it to run quickly enough to be usable. But Andrew and Tom went much further than that. By consistently identifying and fixing issues with the runtime libraries, the compiler, linker and the gcc C++/java ABI they made the GNU Compiler Collection and the GNU/Linux platform a better environment to develop and run such huge multi component systems. This enables developers to create programs in a programming language with support for static typing, exception handling, garbage collection, multi-threading and dynamic object creation and invocation. All while keeping the traditional GNU way in mind to make it possible to easily interoperate with other languages and libraries supported on a GNU system. The result is not just a Fast Free Eclipse. We now have the fastest Eclipse on the planet! This effort was clearly not possible without the support of a lot of other hackers. For the purpose of winning this prize special mention should also be given to the following Red Hat people: Anthony Green made an important garbage collection fix. Graydon Hoare did lots of profiling and identified critical performance bottlenecks. And Jakub Jelinek fixed the most critical performance bottleneck. Together with Tom and Andrew they are the winners of the Fast Free Eclipse prize and they will receive a GNU appreciation package. Links: GNU Compiler for Java (gcj) http://gcc.gnu.org/java/ Eclipse, universal tool platform - an open extensible IDE http://www.eclipse.org/ Natively compiled Eclipse http://sources.redhat.com/eclipse/
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