[kaffe] Gilgul 1.0.7 released

[Pascal Costanza]

Dalibor Topic wrote:
> Hi Fabio, Hi Jon,
> 
> --- Gilgul Maintainer <gilgul at joint.org> wrote:
> 
>>Hi,
>>
>>I'd like to anounce the "new" version of the gilgul
>>virtual machine, 
>>which is based on kaffe-1.0.7.
> 
> 
> cool, congratulations on a new release.
> 
> 
>>Gilgul is an compatible extension to the Java
>>language, 
>>which provides means for unanticipated software
>>evolution.
>>Head to
>>http://javalab.cs.uni-bonn.de/research/gilgul/ for 
>>more information and download.
> 
> 
> I'm impressed by the atomic object reference rerouting
> feature. I think it would be interesting to see some
> colaboration between your work and Jon's. BDBJ [1] is
> a Java debugger based on kaffe that allows to step
> *backwards* through code. 

Stepping backwards indeed sounds cool.

> So picture a combination of both: an ueber-debugger
> that allows you to find the bug, step back until you
> find the offending statement, and to replace the buggy
> instance with a corrected version. That could bring a
> HotSwap [2] capability to BDBJ, and later, kaffe, if
> we implement JVMDI and friends based on BDBJ.

Yes, this sounds extremely useful. But please note the following:

+ HotSwap has a different granularity - at least in the current version 
of HotSwap, you can replace a single method of a class at once such that 
all instances of a class are affected immediately. In Gilgul, you can 
only affect one instance at a time. (It depends on the context what is 
more useful - both approaches have their advantages and disadvantages.)

Maybe a combination of Gilgul and Guarana could be useful in order to 
replace metaobjects at runtime?!?

>>We would be grateful for your feedback, be it
>>questions, bug reports, 
>>or advices. (especially on tweaking the build system
>>to the end of 
>>getting rid of ./gilgul_install and proper make
>>[test|check])
> 
> 
> I've tried to download it, but the web server says:
> You don't have permission to access
> /research/gilgul/downloads/gvm-1.0.7-0.2.tar.gz on
> this server.

Yes, that's broken. We are going to fix that soon.

> the gilgul web page states that your compiler, ggc,
> doesn't work on kaffe. Could you elaborate on what's
> missing/broken?

The Gilgul compiler is based on the original Java compiler by Sun. I 
don't know the reason why it doesn't work on kaffe - I guess there are 
some libraries missing. This wasn't important to us yet.

>>I'd like to thank you for the help you gave me
>>during the development, 
>>and of course for kaffe itself. Keep up the good
>>work.
> 
> 
> Thanks for using kaffe for your research.
> 
> If you've fixed any bugs in kaffe's core or libraries
> while you were working on Gilgul, it would be nice if
> you could post the patches with some Changelogs.
> 
> cheers,
> dalibor topic
> 
> [1]
> http://www.dcs.ed.ac.uk/home/jjc/bdbj/bdbj-1.2.1/dl.html
> [2]
> http://java.sun.com/products/hotspot/docs/whitepaper/Java_Hotspot_v1.4.1/Java_HSpot_WP_v1.4.1_1002_3.html#hot
> 
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-- 
Pascal Costanza               University of Bonn
mailto:costanza at web.de        Institute of Computer Science III
http://www.pascalcostanza.de  Römerstr. 164, D-53117 Bonn (Germany)