Re: Recognizing gcj as default StandardVM (JRE System Library)

[Mark Wielaard <mark at klomp dot org>]

Hi Jan,

On Sat, 2003-08-02 at 17:43, Jan Schulz wrote:
> Just something about me: I'm the debian maintainer of the eclipse
> packages and I taking this list and the binaries as something to learn
> from :) I would really be happy if eclipse could be run with a free
> VM. Unfortunatelly I don't have much experience with gcj, so please be
> patient with me. But I will read up te required knowledge...

No worries. Although gcj normally takes a "radically traditional"
approach to the language by just treating it as another thing to compile
to native code (like C, C++, Fortran, Mercury, etc.) it also comes with
gij, an interpreter for byte code. Although using gij doesn't give you
much of the advantages of normal natively compiled applications and
shared libraries produced with gcj. You can still play with it to see
what can be done in a way that might be more 

> * Mark Wielaard wrote:
> >It took me some time to convince eclipse to recognize gcj/gij/libgcj as
> >standard vm.
> 
> Does this mean that eclipse will run with a (patched?) gcj as
> '*/bin/java' (not native, but in the VM)?

With the just released RPMs I have been able to run the natively
compiled eclipse (eclipse plus plugins all compiled to native code). And
I have been able to run a traditional eclipse release (as downloaded
from eclipse.org) with just the gij interpreter that comes with those
RPMs. You can run such a traditional eclipse with the '-vm gij-ssa'
option. (Using the interpreter is clearly slower then using native code,
but I was surprized by how fast it still was.)

The /usr/bin/java script wrapper around gij is mostly for convenienve
since eclipse expects a java byte code interpreter (that is called
'java') to execute user created code. And it expects that java binary to
have the sun.boot.class.path system property to be set.

> [running natively]
> What will happen with all the plugins? Are they still recognised when
> eclipse is started as native binary? Are they still runable? 

I don't have that much experience with Eclipse but it seemed that most
things worked out of the box.

Cheers,

Mark