Hi Patrícia, In my proposal, I elected just to integrate GCSpy with Harmony - I had a chat with Richard Jones at Kent, who's responsible for GCSpy and has a similar GSoC project running for JikesRVM, and discussed exactly how far he thought I could get with it over the GSoC period. The conclusions we came to from that discussion was that integrating GCSpy, writing drivers for each GC, and then updating GCSpy itself to include the latest changes made to the architecture (http://pubs.doc.ic.ac.uk/GCspy/ has some information on that) was possible. It's likely that the latter part would benefit from communication with the JikesRVM project, to make sure that the GCSpy servers (C++ for Harmony, Java for JikesRVM) are consistent.
Richard also stressed that it's very important that GCSpy have negligible performance impact when the visualizer's not connected, and suggested ways I could benchmark to check that this is the case. I think that it's realistic to integrate GCSpy and test it properly over the GSoC period, and I wrote up my proposal based on that, from a deliverable-oriented perspective. While I'd definitely be interested in longer-term involvement with Harmony if this summer goes to plan, I felt that this was a sensible way to approach GSoC. I didn't, then, look too deeply at writing Eclipse plugins, though I did have a brief scan of the Rich Client Platform documentation. The proposal I looked at from Jikes: http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/RVM-388 discusses the possibility of adding GCSpy-style visualization to Tuning Fork: http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/tuningfork http://domino.watson.ibm.com/comm/research_projects.nsf/pages/metronome.tenedor.html (has a link to their research paper on it too). You could extend tuning fork to support GCSpy-style visualizations as a plugin. The only problem is that while I think Tuning Fork's going to be released as OSS, it isn't at the moment. Perhaps a split of integrating GCSpy with Harmony vs developing a better client as an eclipse plug in could work? I'm sure there are other interesting ways of visualizing GC trace output, so there's enough depth on that side too. Rick
