[kaffe] Future directions for Kaffe

[Tim Bevan]

Jim Pick wrote:

>Hi everybody,
>
>It's been a quiet month on the mailing list so far.  That's partly my
>fault, I think, since the mailing list was broken for some time.
>
>It looks like the last CVS commit was 5 weeks ago.
>
>I see Dalibor went to FOSDEM, and did some talking about Kaffe there.
>So I'm assuming that the project isn't dead, it's just somewhat dormant.
> It's been somewhat dead/dormant throughout much of it's history, but
>it's still here, isn't it?  :-)
>
>And clearly, all the free Java runtimes and Classpath are in a state of
>transition, as we wait for Sun to release the rest of OpenJDK.
>
>I'd like to liven up the list a bit, and maybe start a bit of discussion
>on where Kaffe should go next.
>
>Here are some things I'd like to talk about:
>
>
>* Technically speaking, I'm still the project leader, by virtue of
>rescuing it from the ashes of Transvirtual.  But Dalibor is really the
>guy who has been doing most of the work.  I'm not really doing much with
>Kaffe personally, so if anybody else wants to step up and be a real
>project leader, feel free to volunteer.  I'm still happy to keep hosting
>the project and helping out with the releases.
>  
>
Dalibor has been doing a great job. 

>* Speaking of releases, we really should do another release sometime.
>  
>
Yes please. I would like a stable version containing the fixes I needed.

>* I also haven't been responding to emails asking me for help getting
>Kaffe to run.  I'd like to, but since I don't even have it working for
>myself, I'm not really in a position to help out.  I get so much spam
>nowadays that I hardly even use email anymore.  I notice that most
>requests for help to the mailing list are going unanswered as well.
>  
>
Fraid I get the IT department to compile and install for me, so I know 
relatively little about these problems.

>* If anybody is currently doing something interesting with Kaffe, or has
>any aspirations for it, please send some email to the list!  We need the
>ideas and the traffic!
>  
>
Nothing interesting here. I've used Kaffe running under valgrind to 
detect bugs in our C code accessed via JNI. We were unable to detect 
these problems any other way because the Sun JVM defeated most of our 
usual tools.

At present I dont really have an alternative to this (Windows purify 
started spotting additional problems once valgrind had detected the 
first one - they do detect different problems), but I would love to know 
of one. Thankfully such problems are rare, but typically are discovered 
at critical times - they are not keen to do a port to Linux just to find 
the bugs...

-- 
Tim Bevan
Principal Software Engineer
+44 (0)1223 420 414

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