On Thursday 06 November 2003 12:04, Sascha Brawer wrote: > Andrew Haley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote on Thu, 6 Nov 2003 10:28:24 +0000: > >> [having the VMInterfaces classes clearly marked as 'special' > >> would make it easy for VMs and compilers to just inline all calls > >> to them] > > > >It's not particularly difficult to do, but at the moment we don't do > >it. gcj is perfectly capable of whole-program Java optimization but > >we have to follow Java rules, and one of those rules is that you > >cannot inline final methods because it breaks binary compatibility. > >We could teach gcj that VM<foo> classes are an exception to that rule, > >but I think you would agree that's not a pretty solution. > > Apparently, Java 1.5 will have "meta-data" (arbitrary, uninterpreted > declarations for language constructs that are represented in bytecode and > accessible via reflection), similar to CLI/.NET. This might be a much > cleaner approach for declaring such exceptions. Of course, the free > compilers would need to support it first.
You could do it already using the "Attributes" mechanism - Java implementations are supposed to silently ignore attributes they don't understand. The attributes could be inserted by a tool using BCEL, so you wouldn't actually need to modify the compiler ... -- Chris Gray /k/ Embedded Java Solutions Embedded & Mobile Java, OSGi http://www.kiffer.be/k/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] +32 477 599 703 _______________________________________________ Classpath mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/classpath