As was also observed by someone else, I find it rather amusing, and sad, that several years of effort on GCJ, Kaffe and Classpath did not seem to generate as much buzz as a single announcement of an intention by the ASF to create a J2SE 5 implementation.
"Technology and Courage"
"Technology and Courage" (PDF) by Ivan Sutherland. (Thanks Prakash!)
My personal opinion is that if you need Free (as in liberty) Java you have either Kaffe or GCJ depending on whether you prefer the traditional Java execution model or ahead-of-time compilation, respectively, not to mention many other VMs. Both depend on GNU Classpath to provide an implementation of the humongous and unwieldy "core" Java runtime class libraries. Without any elaboration, the "All of these efforts provide a diversity of solutions, which is healthy, but barriers exist which prevent these efforts from reaching a greater potential" from the announcement seems hollow and a serious case of the NIH syndrome.
Lastly, Java isn't even that great a language or has a great runtime that so many talented hackers should be wasting their time on it. Isn't there anyone who can come up with a good general purpose programming language with a good and minimal standard runtime environment and a Free language and runtime specification? I am talking of an imperative language with the ability to easily do OO-programming but where OO is not sickeningly mandated.
IITs
(Disclaimer: I am an alumnus [B.Tech.] of IIT Kanpur with Computer Science as my major, so read the following rant with this fact in mind and your preferred measure of salt.)
I feel that in the last few years the Indian government, irrespective of the party that comes to power, seems hell-bent on killing these awesome engineering institutions which have a largely justified and well-earned reputation worldwide. They started by almost doubling the number of available seats in some departments, notably Computer Science, then by increasing the number of institutes branded "IIT" (from the original 5 to a current target of 11 in total) and finally by making the entrance exams (JEE) much easier for students to crack!
In the short term, they will be able to boast of a much larger number of IIT graduates but will they be able to ensure the quality as well? Are they not killing by dilution the very brand that they wish to exploit? Sheesh!
The rate of incoming junk is far higher than previous such bursts and I have to constantly keep cleaning my mailbox. Interestingly, some of the forged sender addresses indicate that someone reading the GCC list has been infected hard - I can't imagine how else the worm would have got hold of the email addresses of such a disproportionately large number of GCC hackers as well as so many CS-related sites.
I even tried to pry it open and see if there was an obviously loose component anywhere that I could set right, but it's literally a couple of chips soldered onto a small PCB connected to a USB plug. As with almost all purely electronic devices, I cannot do anything here. This is rather unlike mechanical or simple electrical devices where I usually can figure out the problem and sometimes rectify the problem.
I hope some ostriches get their heads out of the sand and take a look at the world around them. :-/
On my home PC, a "c,c++,java" bootstrap takes more than three hours and a complete testsuite run takes a lot of time as well. Considering that any change to the main compiler needs a complete bootstrap and testsuite run twice over (once without and once with your patch), that too in the best case of no regressions, is it small wonder that many people who might want to otherwise volunteer to help with GCC development just cannot afford to? I have only so much free time left after my job and my family and many a time I feel I am much better off reading a good book or watching a good movie, for example, than literally losing sleep over GCC. Small wonder then that almost all of the prolific contributors to GCC either work on it as a part of their job or on really fast machines with loads of memory (or both).
Perhaps it is not a good idea after all to have a single compiler codebase support so many languages and runtimes at the same time. Perhaps it would be better to start over by creating a well-defined (in terms of the structure and contract) set of language and platform-independent intermediate languages (different avatars of GENERIC and RTL) and have the front-ends and the back-ends as separate projects from the core framework. Of course, if things were this simple people would have done it already, but a man can dream, can't he?
Miscellany
QEMU 0.7.0 is available now.
"Fortress" (PDF) is a new language from Sun. (Yes, courtesy LtU once more.)
Needless to say, my interest in learning Qt has evaporated and so has my desire to create a native Java API viewer for Linux.
New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
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If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!