Re: Weird characters in java/lang/Character.java

[Etienne M. Gagnon]

Hi Eric,

On Mon, Sep 03, 2001 at 08:28:18PM -0600, Eric Blake wrote:
> I'm the release manager for the upcoming jikes 1.15 release, currently
> targetted for Sept 26. Is there an actual bug with jikes' interpretation
> of encodings?  If so, it might be a wise idea to move this discussion
> over to the jikes mailing lists, to see if we can repair it in time for
> the next release.
> 
> Unfortunately, I'm not the expert on encodings.  As pointed out earlier,
> the most portable solution would be using \uxxxx characters instead of
> 8-bit ascii characters in the source .java files of Classpath, as then
> jikes does not have to pull any encoding tricks.

I do not exactly know what jikes 1.14's problem is, but the problem could
be deeper than encoding of source files.  Here's what I experienced.

Once it was discovered that the "java/lang/Character.java" had non-ASCII
characters, I wrote a simple program to check all the sources of Classpath/
Sablepath for non-ASCII characters.  I only found 2 such charaters in
java/lang/Character.java, more specifically inside /** javadoc */ comments.

** Then, I removed those characters. **

So, at that point, there was no reason anymore for Jikes to fail, I thought.
Unfortunately, this was not the case.  Jikes 1.14 fails to compile many
classes, dying unexpectedly with segmentation faults.  As I am on Debian "sid",
I checked the Debian bugtracking system, and effectively there is a bug report
related to unexpected segfaults.  So, I went to the official Jikes web site
and recompiled a fresh 1.14 copy.  This didn't work either.  Then, I downloaded
and recompiled a fresh 1.13 copy, now everything worked well.

If you want to test this for yourself (with 1.14), please grab the latest CVS
snaptshot of sablepath-classes, e.g.:

$ cvs -d:pserver:address@hidden:/cvsroot/sablevm login
(simply press [ENTER] when asked for a password)
$ cvs -d:pserver:address@hidden:/cvsroot/sablevm co sablepath-classes
$ cd sablepath-classes
$ ant compile

OK, this assumes you have jakarta's ant tool installed on your system.
The build.xml file is already configured to call jikes. 
[See : http://jakarta.apache.org/ant/]

If you do not have ant, you can write:

$ cd sablepath-classes/src
$ cat ../broken-classes | xargs rm
$ find | grep \\.java$ | xargs -t -n 1 jikes --bootclasspath . --classpath . 

You'll see jikes dying unexpectedly.

Please communicate my thanks to the Jikes community for providing us with a nice
and fast, Open Source/Free java compiler.

Etienne
-- 
Etienne M. Gagnon                               address@hidden
SableVM:                                       http://www.sablevm.org/
SableCC:                                       http://www.sablecc.org/