Older blog entries for Anthony (starting at number 1)

Tom recently started a thread on rolling new libffi releases. There's been some good input so far, and I finally responded today. Constant pressure from Tom and Mark, as well as this discussion, is helping motivate me into action.

Embedded Systems Conference

I spent most of last week in San Francisco at the Embedded Systems Conference for Red Hat. We were there promoting GNUPro tools and our embedded services. Several people searched me out to discuss gcj, and how they've been tracking its progress for use in their products. While most gcj activity is happening on Linux and Windows these days, few people know that gcj was originally developed for embedded systems hackers. Our initial target was an embedded MIPS-based platform. It was fun to talk about gcj at the show. Perhaps it will be coming to a video slot machine near you... :-) We also had some boxes running gcj-built-Eclipse as an IDE for embedded development, and it performed very well.

LiveCD experiment

Last night I managed to build a Fedora Core 2 test2 based LiveCD specifically for turning idle PCs into temporary distcc clients. This isn't a new idea, but the existing hacks I've seen weren't exactly what I was looking for. It boots properly and I get a shell, which I consider partial victory. I'll try installing distcc next.

There have been a couple of major milestones in gcj-land these past two days:

• libgcj.dll works on Windows. Thanks to Chris Faylor for pointing out recent binutils progress which made this possible.
• Eclipse runs with gij for a non-trivial amount of time. tromey, mjw, aph and others have really done a great job.

3.3 is looking really good right now. I was able to bring up xscale-elf out of the box, and frv-elf with a little bit of work. Now, if we can get the mingw32 DLL bits into 3.3 it will be perfect. Hopefully somebody will pick this up.