Older blog entries for rmathew (starting at number 3)

Oh Joy! Mainline snapshots of GCC have also become available now apart from the normal release branch snapshots. This means that people on slow and unreliable links like me can keep up with GCC development.

On the other hand, trying to wade through two large underdocumented code bases - one at work and the other at home (GCC) - is somewhat taxing and I invariably end up too tired to hack on GCJ on a weekday by the time I reach home. :-(

Michael Tiemann's account of how Cygnus was created and sustained itself makes for fascinating reading! IMHO this company, now merged with RedHat, singlehandedly contributed immensely to the GCC/binutils/GDB projects and really laid the foundation for them to become what they have - we in the Free Software world really owe them a lot. Kudos to these cool guys.

I managed to get package-private access checking partially working again in GCJ - as Tom tromey had predicted, this did turn up a bunch of illegal accesses in libgcj that were not being caught all this while! Some of them are trivial to overcome, some not so.

Things like foo.Bar.snafu( ) still manage to slip through GCJ though if foo.Bar is a class in a different package with package-private access and snafu( ) is a method with public access. Ditto for fields.

This made me try to go through the front-end code to figure out where to make the change for checking this and Tom was proved right once again - though the parser proper is simple to understand, the analysis stage went straight over my head and repeated attempts to comprehend it have proved futile.

That doesn't mean that I am going to give up yet, but it does mean that I am filled with immense respect for people who have been able to work their way through the front-end code and actually improve it!

It also tells me how mistaken I was about my programming capabilities. :-(

For some wonderful and happy reason, tromey, mjw, Anthony and Jeff have all suddenly become active on GCJ again, all at the same time, after being dormant for several weeks! For some weird reason, they had also all gone dormant at about the same time.

This weekend I finally found out that the intermittent and increasingly irritating crashes on my home PC while building GCC on Linux was actually due to a defective RAM module - after removing the offending module, everything was back to normal, even after extended stress testing.

I do not want to code for Windows any more!

As a developer, I have always enjoyed working on Linux and have hated working on Windows. In the recent past, I have been exposed to all sorts of Windows ugliness trying to make GCJ work on Windows - I did not enjoy it at all!

This just is not my cup of tea - I love working on Linux and that is what I shall do.