Kaffe and Status

[Archie Cobbs]

Duncan W. McQueen writes:
> 1).  What is the status in CVS of Kaffe's current JDK 1.1 or 1.2 
> compliance?  Has anyone run the Mauve test-suite against it?  I know 
> Kaffe  contributed to Mauve, but I see no test results on the site.  We 
> are working on adding some functionality (java.security), how easy is 
> it to get these committed to CVS?  Can we use Classpath as a reference 
> for implementing som e of these new functions?

We are sortof inbetween 1.1 and 1.2, but in general are trying to get to 1.2.
I've communicated with Sean and it doesn't look like there should be
any problem getting his java.security stuff checked in..

> 2).  What is the performance of the JIT compiler?    Has any work been 
> done on providing more optimizations?  How about a better garbage 
> collector?  How about a more efficient implementation of deciding when 
> to compile and interpret code in the JIT (HotSPot I guess addressed 
> this).

TVT is going to release their new & improved JIT engine sometime soon..
As for garbage collection, Godmar has been working on that some, maybe
he can share some insights. Don't know if the new JIT supports conditional
JIT'ing or not.

> 3).  Has any work been done on the precompilation of its run-time 
> libraries?  Any more integration with gcj?

Nothing's happened with this for a while.. volunteers very welcome.
In particular I'd like us to do both of the above.

> 4).  Is Kaffe's synchronization system being optimized?

I think Tim may have some ideas about this.. JDK 1.2 allows the VM to
assume that MONITORENTER/MONITOREXIT occur in pairs, in which case you
can optimize locking by keeping lock state on the stack, etc.

> 5).  What about replacing pizza with Jikes (I know, this isn't 
> necessary, but pizza is sooo slow).

We are moving from pizza to Kopi soon because of license issues, but
it's not any faster. Personally I have jikes installed separately
and use it instead..

> 6).  Anyone working on an OJI interface (Mozilla) or ever created a 
> Netscape style plug-in for using Kaffe as the JVM behind Netscape?

Not that I'm aware of..

> I know these are a few questions, but Kaffe is the only option we have 
> on BeOS for Java currently, and my project wants to develop a solid, 
> fast, highly efficient, complete Java runtime for BeOS (And Development 
> Environment as well)

That's great! We need more kaffe developers!! :-)

-Archie

___________________________________________________________________________
Archie Cobbs   *   Whistle Communications, Inc.  *   http://www.whistle.com