Re: Developing VM

[Mark Wielaard]

Hi,

On Sun, 2003-08-10 at 15:32, Peter Werno wrote:
> we are developing a new Virtual Machine for Amiga OS
> (http://sourceforge.net/projects/jamiga) which will be bundled with the
> GNU classpath.

Nice. Hope you find GNU Classpath useful for bringing a VM to that
platform.

> Our VM is following a differnet approach and JNI has not been implemented
> yet. Moreover, we tend to implement a lot of the core functions/classes
> natively straight into the VM, as the older 68K-processors of the
> Amiga-Systems are not really up to speed with modern Intel or IBM-chips!

In principle GNU Classpath can be used by VMs that don't support JNI.
But JNI makes things a lot easier since for almost everything we supply
native JNI C based implementations. But we also try to setup everything
so that classes don't need explicit native methods. In principle every
class that needs native or VM support (or a particular system/VM
optimization) delegates to a package private final VMSomething class
that is VM dependent and that does the correct thing on that VM (so if
the VM supports JNI then in most cases it can use the default
vm/reference classes that use the supplied native JNI implementations.

But this support is not complete yet so we need developers of VMs that
don't support JNI to help us point out where we need to abstract away
from direct native methods. Welcome! You have just volunteered :)

> For this reason, it would be very useful, if we could get information on
> changes, especially where native method calls are involved.
> 
> Would this kind of information usually be broadcasted on this mailing
> list, or are there different channels that I should subscribe to?

There are two mailinglist: http://savannah.gnu.org/mail/?group=classpath
address@hidden and address@hidden The first one (this
mailinglist) is were all the technical discussion takes place, also
discussion related to VM interface changes (which should always be
listed in the NEWS file).
If you want to follow development closely then you also need to
subscribe to the second mailinglist which gets email whenever code in
CVS changes or the bug or patch tracker record changes.

Cheers,

Mark