Re: Classpath build process and VM-specific issues

[Michael Koch]

Am Montag, 5. April 2004 18:07 schrieb Andrew Haley:
> Jeroen Frijters writes:
>  > Andrew Haley wrote:
>  > > Michael Koch writes:
>  > >  > > To be honest I think we should not have RawData in
>  > >  > > Classpath.
>  > >
>  > > The trouble with RawData (as it is used in gcj) is that it
>  > > breaks the Java type system.  Its bizarre semantics mean that
>  > > you have something that looks like an object reference but you
>  > > can't use it as one.  You can't convert it to an instance of
>  > > Object, for example.
>  >
>  > Not necessarily. On my (admittedly weird) VM, RawData is a direct
>  > pointer, but it can also be treated as an object, this is not
>  > particularly efficient way of using it (it gets boxed), but it
>  > does work.
>
> Yeah, but that's a special case.  In general, on most VMs, you can't
> convert a RawData to an Object.
>
>  > Etienne Gagnon wrote:
>  > > IMO, the cleanest approach is really the use of a byte array.
>  >
>  > But it is inefficient and hard to optimize.
>
> Right.  The choice of a byte array is the worst of all possible
> worlds.  Well okay, it is at least portable, but it has no other
> virtues.

I'm not really experienced with JNI and look what you all come up with.
To me the byte[] solutions seems to be the most complicated to use 
because its easy possible to cast it to void*.


Michael