Re: [Sablevm-developer] Re: while building ant... and some other stuff

[Etienne M. G. <eti...@uq...>]

On Sun, Aug 11, 2002 at 10:23:08PM +0200, Grzegorz Prokopski wrote:
> BTW: Would it be possible to keep all the classpath as jar or .zip
> file? would it slow down things much? I know it's on the bottom of
> TODO file, but keeping all the classes uncompressed looks... strange.
> 
> Q: Is all the classpath treated as bootclasspath?

For the moment, yes, because anything that might be reached by, let
say, class initializers of bootstrap classes (Object, System, Thread,
etc.) has to also be in the bootstrap classpath.  It's amazing to see
the number of classes loaded to run a simple HelloWorld java program.
Try "sablevm -s HelloWorld"...

Supporting .jar on the boot classpath means being able to read .jar
files using C code.  The beauty of SableVM is that it avoids such
difficulties by using an application class loader written in Java,
that can thus use the java.util.jar classes to do this, but this means
it isn't available to bootstrap classes (some kind of chicken-engg
problems, as there are *many* when bootstrapping a VM).

This being said, nothing precludes tring to hack something in, at some
point, or even linking with some zip library, as long as it is license
compatible, and that it doesn't leak memory or resources (I'm quite
firm on these two points).  In fact, I'll either fix the memory leaks
in libpopt, or abandon it, eventually.  This leak is not that bad, as
libpopt is not linked to libsablevm.so, only to bin/sablevm, yet I
would like to get rid of it, eventually.

> We have time. ATM I mostly need your assistance and discussion/mails
> than any coding. We _do_ have time. Sarge won't release tomorrow ;-)

Good.

> PS: are you doing master's degree or PhD? or what?
> 'thesis' seems to be unclear - at least for me.

Ph.D.  In fact, I've taken some advance and I already am a University
"Assistant Professor" at UQAM. ;-)

> PSS: When we have some initial stuff moved into main - I'll make
> an announcement on debian-devel and debian-java that people should start
> trying sablevm and friends to compile their packages with free
> stuff only. Maybe in a month or two...

Then, we'll start receiving bunch of bug reports... Nice.  We'll just
have to sort through what goes to SableVM and what should be
redirected to Classpath.  (I'll help).  The nice thing is that I also
am a Classpath developer, having sent the copyright assignment paper
work, etc.  So, I'll be able to quickly fix small things upstream if
the need arises.

Etienne
-- 
Etienne M. Gagnon                    http://www.info.uqam.ca/~egagnon/
SableVM:                                       http://www.sablevm.org/
SableCC:                                       http://www.sablecc.org/