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Scott Furman wrote:
> My hope was that whatever API you were using to connect to Japhar could also be
> used with ElectricalFire.
Ok, I did some reading up on Electrical Fire on your web site. And I have a
few questions.
First, do you consider yourself:
a) A standalone JVM that compiles everything to native in order to run it
b) A JIT plug-in for existing JVM's.
c) both
If it is (a), then you might want to make use of the Classpath libraries
directly. This is really not too hard, but requires some work. Basically
we expect that some of the lowest level functions of the JVM (parts of
java.lang and reflection) be implemented in the JVM itself. There is a
document on our web site (http://www.classpath.org/) that explains this in
more detail. John Keiser ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote it and knows the most about
what is needed. For Japhar, things were very simple. It already wrote most
of what we needed for supporting the Sun JDK libraries and we were able to
hook into it quite simply. For EF, some investigation would need to be
done. Once that is done, everything should be ok. The only potential
gotcha I see is that we load our own native libraries and I'm not sure how
JIT's Java routines interface with existing native code.
If it is (b), then we need to figure out how to make Japhar interface to a
JIT subsystem. I know know if there is an API for this or not. Hopefully
someone on their list will answer up. My knowledge of Japhar's internals
isn't that great. I do know that Japhar is LGPL'd, except for the "japhar"
stub program that fires up the engine and launches programs. That is under
the GPL, which is incompatible with the NPL license you use. However, this
is only a tiny portion of Japhar and I am fairly confident that the Japhar
people wouldn't object to plugging in an NPL licensed JIT compiler.
Next, I see that you are written in C++. Both Japhar and Classpath (and
Kaffe as well, I believe) use C exclusively. Interfacing between the
languages is easy, but the use of C++ does tend to make EF run on fewer
systems as not everybody has a C++ compiler.
Lastly, could rename the project back to "Sexual Chocolate"?
--
Aaron M. Renn ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) http://www.urbanophile.com/arenn/
