Re: Working On Classpath

[Thomas Zander]

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On Wednesday 26 May 2004 23:47, Andrew John Hughes wrote:
>  Given the
> length of time that the Free Java projects have now been active, it
> amazes me that so little consideration is given to alternate VMs and
> compilers by the Java community, especially for FOSS.

The free-java projects have made a bad start; when I just started using 
Java I tried kaffe and Jikes. Kaffe was totally unusable; and since I 
still can't apt-get it, its not on my radar.  (I'm wondering how many 
distro's ship kaffe.)
Jikes is a good example of Foss going wrong; in the time I was using 1.11 
up-until 1.13, mostly because of its speed.
During this time more and more problems came in; errors in compiling that 
were not errors at all, and un-verifiable classes which caused clients to 
not be able to run the software as soon as it was compiled with jikes.
I'm not sure if the situation with jikes cleared up; but our company still 
has a VERY strict policy about not using jikes; ever!

footnote; I compiled Mauve some weeks ago only to find out that on 
suns-javac it did not compile. The problem was an illegal-code-construct. 
This tells me that jikes still is not mature enough for production code 
(since many people compiled it fine in the weeks before)

> I know Ant 
> supports alternate compilers, but this wouldn't exactly be very clear to
> someone who wants to use Ant in the same way as make ('make' -->
> 'ant').

The whole point of ant is to throw away make; Java programmers program java 
because its easier to use the tools. Most have no idea if they are using 
spaces or tabs (for instance). This means that they all curse like hell if 
they have to edit a Makefile and it won't work because it needs a tab at 
begin of line.
There are dozens of reasons why ant is 'better' then make; it has been 
created as a replacement for make after all...

> One of the reasons that I think the autoconf/make stuff is 
> still a superior solution, even for Java, is that these solutions tend
> to detect what a user actually has, instead of defaulting to Sun's JVM.
> Apologies if some of this is wrong, but this is the impression I, and I
> guess other users, get of the Ant/Tomcat situation.

The only answer I can give is that a superior technology that has poor 
usability tends to be replaced.

- -- 
Thomas
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