On Wed, Mar 08, 2006 at 01:40:51PM +0100, Philippe Laporte wrote: > Hi, > May I ask a crazy question: why does Kaffe still exist?
It is Free Software, and it works. It works very well for its users, its fun to develop, and it's a good GNU Classpath citizen, contributing back to the upstreams it takes code from, and encouraging others to contribute. It acts as the staging area for libraries and tools that eventually end up in GNU Classpath, the 'state-of-the-art' of integration, if you wish. It's integrating other projects very well, and it integrates itself nicely with other projects. Technically, it's one of the fast and feature rich free VMs out there, widely ported and easily portable, with a lot of good work that went into it over the years by many excellent contributors. It's got a nice community of research spin-offs, that cover anything from transparent clustering to isolation, features that can't be found in proprietary runtimes. I could go on for a while, but I am afraid I'll bore you. > > With all the great open-source VM projects out there, which are > successors to Kaffe if you will, why don't we focus efforts a bit more. Feel free to merge whatever bits you like from those VMs into Kaffe, and post a patch. I am curios what you'll come up with. > I may be somewhat ignorant as I haven't followed Kaffe since 2001, but > perhaps it is time to pick aprt its best parts which don't yet have > equivalents elsewhere, and leave it to the cemetary of the once-famous? Yeah, that's the problem with not following projects, one remembers them as dead, and they turn out to be very lively zombies and take one by surprise. ;) Kaffe is going pretty strong, as free runtimes go. It's successfully used for support for programs and libraries written in the Java programming language in several distributions. It has changed massively since 2001, see http://www.kaffe.org/~robilad/kaffe-loc.png for a graphic showing the progress until may 2005. I should regenerate it one day, but I've got more pressing bugs to fix. ;) Finally, Kaffe has been a great platform to advance the case for free software implementations of J2SE, as one among many very good implementations. It has helped along to build GNU Classpath into the common backbone of all free VMs, and grow a strong community around it. It has managed to survive the crash of the company behind the proprietary fork of Kaffe nicely, and come out much better and stronger, which is quite a feat. ;) With the fun stuff out of the way, let's get to the boring part. You seem, afaict from your posts, to want to do something that involves getting rich quick by selling a Java implementation for Nokia's maemo device, and you seem to be interested in using a free runtime as the foundation for your financial success. Good luck, whichever you end up using (and I'd suggest JamVM for the maemo, since I've heard people had it running on that device already). cheers, dalibor topic > Best Regards, > > -- > Philippe Laporte > Software > > Gatespace Telematics > F?rsta L?nggatan 18 > 41328 G?teborg > Sweden > Phone: +46 702 04 35 11 > Fax: +46 31 24 16 50 > Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > > _______________________________________________ > kaffe mailing list > kaffe@kaffe.org > http://kaffe.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kaffe _______________________________________________ kaffe mailing list kaffe@kaffe.org http://kaffe.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kaffe
