Date: Mon, 26 Feb 2001 02:33:45 -0800 From: Bill Huey <billh@gnuppy.monkey.org> To: freebsd-java@freebsd.org Cc: Andrew Reilly <areilly@bigpond.net.au>, David Xu <bsddiy@163.net>, Zsolt Kuti <kuti@cetelem.hu>, freebsd-java@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Virtual Machines. Message-ID: <20010226023345.A6701@gnuppy> In-Reply-To: <no.id>; from billh@gnuppy.monkey.org on Mon, Feb 26, 2001 at 01:57:10AM -0800 References: <20010226204510.A23200@gurney.reilly.home>
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"elm" seems to be on crack, so I'm forwarding this again. ;-) -------------------- > If it's not violating any NDAs, could you give a quick summary > for the peanut gallery about _why_ porting the Sun JVM to *BSD > is difficult? The Sun propaganda had led me to believe that > the JVM was a small, simple thing that even a tiny embedded > controller could support. Na, it's a virtual machine, so you can take examples from many language systems, python's VM in particular and talk about those issues generically. > Is it just really badly written? Well, the folks that have to port the thing whine all day along about it, but it doesn't mean that it's poorly written. > Or is it hard to make the Sun garbage collector deal with BSD > VM? > Or are the BSD pthreads implementations somehow inadequate? No, that stuff is ok. > Or is there porting work in the standard java libraries, (which > I understand are quite large) as well as in the JVM itself? Yes, that and the threading stuff. Virtual machine themselves are very complicated with many of the typical problems associated with complicate threading systems. The JVM and other VMs pretty much touch everything in Unix from the compiler tools chains, posix threading, async IO, networking, language runtimes that are associated with the per thread stack stuff and you have to have C glue code that formally deals with all of that in some coherent manner. ...add stuff like C based method invocation at runtime, class reflection, etc... and you've got a serious mess. > Sorry for being intrusive. I've just been impressed over the > last couple of years at how gaping the gap between Sun's "Java > everywhere" rhetoric and the observable fact that Java wasn't > actually anywhere that I cared to be... I can't comment on that since I don't know anything about the embedded stuff that they're doing, but I would think that it vary greatly one the libraries/compiler that you're using in that specific system. > Andrew bill To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-java" in the body of the message
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