Who is (not) using GNU Classpath [was Re: [Sablevm-user] hello]

[Grzegorz B. P. <ga...@de...>]

On (20/04/04 15:17), David B?langer wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 20, 2004 at 04:20:23PM +0200, Fabien Renaud wrote:
> > Hello,
> > 
> > I?d like to know why there is a graphical difference between kaffe and 
> > sableVM when I run the Calc kaffe example ( with awt ) And why the 
> > application is so pretty with SableVM whereas it?s so awful with kaffe ( 
> > big red rectangle)
> > 
> 
> Hi,
> 
> The prettiness is done by the GNU Classpath (CP) library.

true (and by GTK+ ;)

> Both SableVM and Kaffe use CP [*] [...]

NOT TRUE!  And I see this statment much too often.  Kaffe's classpath is
NOT GNU Classpath.  GCJ's classpath is NOT GNU Classpath.  Each of these
projects has its own classpath containing more or less code from GNU CP.
[**]

Why is this distinction important?  Just to get on one of examples I saw.

While running ANT 1.5 it creates .jar file using ZIP classes.  Now, last
time I tried it - it did work w/ Kaffe (and I can suspect it also worked
w/ GCJ) but it did not with SableVM.  Was that SableVM's fault?  NO!
The problem that GNU CP zip compression implementation was getting into
an infinite loop!

So while I *strongly* do NOT want to point to GNU CP hackers as the
guilty ones :) I also just can't bear it when people say that

	"Kaffe, GCJ and SableVM should be able to run pretty much the same
	 apps because they all use GNU Classpath"

Agrh!  This is NOT true! (unless you accept half-truths as truths)

Thank you for your attention,

				Grzegorz B. Prokopski

[*] From the context I assumed you meant GNU CP.

[**] Obviously, we've also modified GNU Classpath to make it work with
SableVM.  But our modifications are truly minimal, unlike the differences
between GNU Classpath and classpaths used by Kaffe and GCJ.

This is partially because ex.:
- GCJ has a lot of GCJ-specific code, which is not useful to other, normal VMs
- Kaffe is in the process of switching to GNU CP, but even if it gets there -
  I don't think we'll be able to say that it "just uses GNU CP", because Kaffe
  hackers also mix in their classlib a lot of software from different sources.

-- 
Grzegorz B. Prokopski <ga...@de...>
Debian GNU/Linux      http://www.debian.org
SableVM - LGPLed JVM  http://www.sablevm.org
Why SableVM ?!?       http://devel.sablevm.org/wiki/WhySableVM