JamVM 1.2.0 released

[Robert Lougher]

Hi,

I'm pleased to announce the release of JamVM 1.2.0
(http://jamvm.sourceforge.net).  The following changes have been made
since 1.1.4:

- Substantially rewritten the interpreter to use "stack-caching".  This is
  an optimisation to eliminate most of the intermediate loads and stores to
  the operand stack.  On desktop PowerPC (e.g. PPC750fx, MPC7447 with large,
  on-chip L2 cache at full processor speed) it achieves a speed increase of
  between 15 and 30%.  On ARM (XScale PXA250) it achieves a speed-up of 
  50%.  Unfortunately, due to the addressing modes of the IA32 (Pentium, etc.)
  and the code produced by gcc, it is actually slower than the old interpreter!
  Because of this, stack-caching is disabled by default on IA32.

- Zip/Jar support is implemented in the bootstrap class loader.  This means
  glibj.zip no longer needs to be unzipped.  This includes resources.

- Fix for edge-conditions in floating-point to integer conversion (floating-
  point value greater than int/long range).

- Fix for very large array allocation, where the required memory overflows a
  32 bit int (fixes the SEGV with Mauve).

- Several other minor bug-fixes (e.g. ExceptionCheck was missed out of the JNI
  i/f table).

As usual I'd like to thank Mark Wielaard for testing pre-releases.

Thanks,

Rob.