The Cygwin annoyances continued. I've reinstalled Cygwin from scratch on my notebook. Trying to debug kaffe in gdb regularly sends it into core-dump-land. The workaround to use the java.util.zip implementation from GNU Classpath works, and I'd like to check it in, but the pure java zip file deflator delays program startup by a few seconds (minutes in interpreter mode). I'll have to wait until Cygwin gets a more useful gdb and debug the native code, since it would be quite pointless for embedded users to have pure java implementation of java.util.zip that takes ages to load classes. On the other hand, I have some hope that Artur Besiadlowski can improve the performance of the pure java implementation a bit further. He's done a lot of work on it recently for GNU Classpath.

On the bright side, I've just merged in javax.sound from tritonus into kaffe's CVS tree. Sampled sound is available via the ALSA and Esd backends. MIDI should work through ALSA, but there seems to be some obscure bug that prevents me from playing mid files.

My hero of the week is Dylan Schell, who ported kaffe to Playstation 2 running Linux. Close second is Helmer Kraemer, who provided some patches to kaffe's javah tool that made it possible to merge in javax.sound.

If I should pick a hero of the month, it would be the Tritonus developers, who have been very helpful during the merge. They actually changed their backend libraries from C++ to C after I complained that C++ libraries are quite painful to support under libtool. Matthias Pfisterer did an amazing load of work to get tritonus into kaffe.

In the patch queue we have a submisson that ports kaffe's Qt based AWT backend to Trolltech's Qtopia desktop. That should let kaffe run on the Sharp Zaurus with AWT.

My Kaffe-On-MingW adventures have resulted in some small patches, but I haven't succeeded in getting it to compile, let alone run. I don't undertand enough about native win32 threading and kaffe's own threading mechanisms to be able to get it to work. Volunteers are welcome to take off where I left.

More stuff has been merged in from GNU Classpath, most prominently java.awt.Graphics2D and the java.awt.image.renderable package. I'll focus on finding bugs in kaffe's and Classpath's collections implementation next, so I could eventually drop the GNU Classpath collections over kaffe's existing implementation. While kaffe's Collections work quite well, they don't provide SubMaps, and japitools won't run without them.