GCJ - Less Recent News

January 16, 2006

Mark Wielaard has imported GNU Classpath 0.20 (release notes) into GCJ.

November 17, 2005

Mark Wielaard has imported GNU Classpath 0.19 (release notes) into GCJ.

October 12, 2005

The October 2005 issue of Red Hat Magazine contains the article "The state of Java on Linux" by Tom Tromey.

September 23, 2005

Tom Tromey has imported GNU Classpath 0.18 (release notes) into GCJ.

July 15, 2005

Tom Tromey has integrated GNU Classpath into the GCJ build in such a way that it becomes much easier to import the latest GNU Classpath into GCJ. This particular import brings in GNU Classpath 0.17 (release notes).

April 6, 2005

Mark Wielaard has written "GCJ - past, present, and future" for LWN.net.

March 10, 2005

Bryce McKinlay has merged in a new stack trace mechanism that is based on GCC's unwind support and provides cleaner and faster stack traces.

February 15, 2005

Thomas Fitzsimmons has checked in an implementation of libjawt, the AWT Native interface. Among other things, this enables the JOGL (OpenGL for Java) bindings to work.

February 1, 2005

We've merged GNU JAXP into the core. This includes many classes in javax.xml, plus updated versions of org.xml.sax and org.w3c.dom.

November 25, 2004

John David Anglin checked in a patch to enable libjava to be built by default on hppa-unknown-linux-gnu.

November 22, 2004

We're pleased to announce that the GCJ binary compatibility branch has been merged to the trunk. This work includes a new ABI which allows precompiled code to follow the binary compatibility rules of the Java programming language.

September 21, 2004

Andreas Tobler imported the new javax.crypto, javax.crypto.interfaces, javax.crypto.spec, javax.net, javax.net.ssl, javax.security.auth, javax.security.auth.callback, javax.security.auth.login, javax.security.auth.x500, javax.security.sasl and org.ietf.jgss packages from the latest GNU Classpath 0.11 developer snapshot release. These packages will be an official part of then next major release. Extra crypto algorithms can be obtained from the GNU Crypto project, a full TLS implementation is provided by the Jessie project.

July 16, 2004

AWT and Swing support continues to improve rapidly. Thomas Fitzsimmons of Red Hat added support for the AWT 1.0 event model, still used by many web applets. This means that Slime Volleyball now runs on GCJ and gcjwebplugin. Here's the evidence!

July 16, 2004

GCJ in the press! The July issue of Linux Journal features an article on building the Eclipse IDE to native code using GCJ: Eclipse goes native. The July issue of Doctor Dobbs Journal also features an article (not available online) on GCJ and the Compiled Native Interface (CNI).

March 9, 2004

Thanks to Wes Biggs and the other GNU Regexp authors, Mark Wielaard (for merging into Classpath) and Anthony Green (for merging into libgcj), we now have support for java.util.regex. This arrives a little too late for gcc 3.4, but it will appear in the next major release.

January 22, 2004

Graydon Hoare has checked in a patch to implement Swing buttons. This is the first working Swing code, a major improvement. See the screen shot.

January 9, 2004

Andrew Haley has checked in a large reorganization of -findirect-dispatch. This is an important step toward the new binary compatibility ABI.

September 3, 2003

Jeff Sturm has adapted Jan Hubicka's call graph optimization code to gcj. This code improves gcj's method inlining abilities with support for out-of-order methods and inter-class method calls, along with improved code size heuristics. It is enabled by default when compiling at -O3.

August 4, 2003

Gary Benson from Red Hat has released Naoko: a subset of the rhug packages that have been repackaged for eventual inclusion in Red Hat Linux. Naoko basically comprises binary RPMS of Ant, Tomcat, and their dependencies built with gcj.

August 2, 2003

Tom Tromey, Andrew Haley and others from Red Hat win the Fast Free Eclipse Prize.

August 1, 2003

A team of hackers from Red Hat has released RPMS for a version of Eclipse, a free software IDE written in Java, that has been compiled with a modified gcj. You can find more information here. We'll be integrating the required gcj patches into cvs in the near future.

July 31, 2003

Andrew Haley has checked in a major patch to the tree-ssa branch that allows us to convert entire functions to trees when reading from .class files. This is an important step towards better high-level optimizations for Java.

July 30, 2003

Thanks to Andreas Tobler and Jeff Sturm, libgcj is now built by default for Darwin. This work is available on the cvs trunk, and will show up in GCJ 3.4.

July 28, 2003

Michael Koch has announced the first (0.0.1) release of gcjwebplugin. This is a plugin to allow execution of applets in web browsers like Mozilla, Konqueror, and Opera. Currently it is still a proof-of-concept.

May 14, 2003

GCC 3.3 has been released. This release includes many bug fixes, support for assert, and JDBC 3.0 support in java.sql and javax.sql, among other things.

January 3, 2003

Jeff Sturm implemented libffi closures for SPARC so that libgcj's bytecode interpreter is now available on SPARC Solaris hosts.

January 1, 2003

The January 2003 issue of Linux Journal contains the article Compiling Java with GCJ by Per Bothner.

December 27, 2002

It is now possible to run the Eclipse IDE using the GCJ runtime, thanks to the work of Tom Tromey, Mark Wielaard, and others. Mark has a web page with further information and screenshots here.

September 29, 2002

Ulrich Weigand has implemented the necessary support in libffi to get libgcj running on the s390x.

September 29, 2002

Anthony Green merged the java.lang.reflect.Proxy implementation in from GNU Classpath.

August 16, 2002

Andrew Haley updated the gcc tree-based inliner to work for gcj.

July 25, 2002

Kaz Kojima has implemented the necessary support in libffi and libjava to get libgcj running on SH-3/4.

July 19, 2002

Bo Thorsen, SuSE Labs, has implemented the necessary support in libffi, boehm-gc and libjava to get libgcj running on x86-64. This is a big step towards getting libgcj fully supported on x86-64.

June 24, 2002

Tom Tromey has checked in a patch that makes the bytecode interpreter use direct threading. This gives the interpreter a performance boost.

June 21, 2002

The java.sql and javax.sql packages were updated by Bryce McKinlay to implement the JDBC 3.0 (JDK 1.4) API.

June 11, 2002

Tom Tromey has implemented the JDK 1.4 assert facility.

March 10, 2002

Adam Megacz has contributed a mingw32 port of libgcj. This port is still a little bit incomplete (e.g., java.lang.Process doesn't work), and it currently only works as a target, not a host. Still, it works, and he is using it for XWT. This work will appear in the upcoming 3.1 release.

February 28, 2002

Bryce McKinlay has contributed a patch to optimize some of the array access and added a new compiler flag, --no-store-check, to disable assignability checks for stores into object arrays. With code that is known not to throw ArrayStoreException, this flag can be used to disable the check operations. In which case it can provide a reasonable performance boost and slight code size reduction.

January 22, 2002

Tom Tromey has contributed a patch to allow certain Java method calls to be inlined by gcj. For instance, calls to Math.min are now inlined when optimization is enabled. This patch includes some infrastructure to make it easy to add more such inlines when desired.

January 14, 2002

Richard Stallman has changed the licensing of the Classpath AWT implementation to match the licensing of the rest of Classpath. This means that the only remaining barrier to AWT for libgcj is manpower. Work has already begun to merge the Classpath and libgcj AWT implementations.

January 14, 2002

Adam Megacz announced that XWT is an ActiveX control which is written in Java and compiled with gcj. We hope to be checking in his Windows patches in the near future.

December 14, 2001

Hans Boehm has checked in changes which once again allow gcj and libgcj to work on IA-64. His changes also speed up allocation of objects which don't require a finalizer.

November 5, 2001

Tom Tromey contributed a bytecode verifier. It hasn't yet been extensively tested, so it is still disabled by default.

October 24, 2001

Tom Tromey of Red Hat checked in the javax.naming and javax.transaction packages, started by Anthony Green finished by Warren Levy and Tom.

October 2, 2001

Tom Tromey of Red Hat has written the support code necessary to implement java.lang.ref.*.

September 7, 2001

Anthony Green of Red Hat has added a facility for compiling property files and other system resources into libraries and executables. These files are accessible to the gcj runtime via the new "core" protocol handler. The gcj runtime places "core:/" at the end of the java.class.path, ensuring that compiled-in resource files are discovered and loaded when required. This is a convenient feature for building and deploying libraries and executables with no external file dependencies. See the --resource option in the gcj manual for details.

August 27, 2001

Tom Tromey has imported RMI into libgcj. This RMI implementation was implemented and donated to the Free Software Foundation by Transvirtual Technologies; many thanks to them for their important contribution.

June 18, 2001

GCC 3.0 has been released! Everything you need to build and run GCJ is now included in a single source distribution. Download it from one of our mirror sites.

June 4, 2001

Per Bothner of Brainfood Inc has implemented an invocation interface allowing an existing non-Java thread to start and connect to a Java environment. The GCJ start-up code now uses this interface. Brainfood is using this to attach an Apache module to a pre-compiled servlet-like class.

May 30, 2001

We now have a new hash-table based lightweight lock implementation which was contributed by Hans Boehm. The new code should reduce memory consumption and improve performance for applications which do a lot of synchronization. Currently, this code is enabled for IA-64 and X86 Linux.

April 25, 2001

Bryce McKinlay merged java.security with Classpath. The new package is now JDK 1.2 compliant, and much more complete.

March 25, 2001

It is now possible to call methods on Java interface references from C++ code via CNI, thanks to Bryce McKinlay's compiler work. Details.

March 25, 2001

Kevin B. Hendricks implemented the necessary FFI support to get the libgcj interpreter running on PowerPC. This is now one of our fully supported targets!

March 7, 2001

The first snapshot from the code branch that will become GCC 3.0 is now available. Snapshots from this branch will be made weekly. These include everything you need to build and run GCJ, and should be much more stable than the main development tree -- so try them out and help us find bugs!

February 8, 2001

Made use of Warren Levy's change to the Mauve test suite to handle regressions. Modifications have been made to mauve.exp to copy the newly created xfails file of known library failures from the source tree to the directory where the libjava 'make check' is being run. This allows the testsuite to ignore XFAILs and thus highlight true regressions in the library. The Mauve tests are automatically run as part of a libjava 'make check' as long as the Mauve suite is accessible and the env var MAUVEDIR is set to point to the top-level of the Mauve source.

January 28, 2001

The various gcj mailing lists have moved to gcc.gnu.org. Unused lists have been removed, and java-discuss was renamed to java. See the announcement for all the gory details. With this change, the gcj project is now fully merged into GCC.

January 17, 2001

GCJ is now compatible with the V3 C++ ABI, thanks to the efforts of Alexandre Petit-Bianco.

December 20, 2000

The Java GNATS database has been merged into the GCC GNATS database. The old database continues to exist but only for reference purposes; it is now read-only.

December 9, 2000

Thanks to Richard Henderson's recent libffi changes, the libgcj bytecode interpreter is now enabled for Alpha systems.

December 9, 2000

The libgcj sources have migrated to the gcc repository. We've imported fastjar in our tree and use it as a replacement to zip.

December 8, 2000

The libgcj repository is now closed: We're moving our sources over to the gcc tree. Read here how you will soon check your sources out.

November 2, 2000

Warren Levy has checked in code for a serialized object dumper. It is enabled by configuring with --enable-libgcj-debug and calling System.setProperty("gcj.dumpobjects", "true"); in your test program. The output will be generated as the object is deserialized (i.e. the readObject() method is executed).

October 29, 2000

Bryce McKinlay checked in a large patch merging parts of the Java Collections code from Classpath into libgcj. He's also been working on reformatting code to fit the coding standards, and tuning the Collections code for performance.

October 27, 2000

Warren Levy has checked in even more serialization work -- he's been working steadily on making object serialization compatible with Sun's implementation for a while now, and I believe we are quite close to complete compatibility.

October 22, 2000

Rolf Rasmussen has checked in a large piece of code implementing most of Xlib-based AWT peers as well as parts of J2D. Bryce McKinlay has also been working on AWT.

September 30, 2000

Bryce McKinlay checked in a patch that enables bitmap-descriptor based marking in the garbage collector. This code includes work by Tom Tromey and Hans Boehm, and results in some significant performance gains in memory-intensive code.

September 8, 2000

Warren Levy checked in various patches that provide much a more compatible serialization implementation. Still some special case classes to go, but 90% of the serializable classes should now be compatible with Sun's JDK.

September 6, 2000

Anthony Green checked in a patch to make gcj read compressed zip files. He also moved zlib into the gcc tree -- the first concrete work towards merging the gcc and libgcj source trees.

August 20, 2000

We haven't had any news in a while, but things have still been happening: Anthony Green recently merged in a lot of Classpath code, in particular the java.util.jar and java.security.cert packages. Also, Bryce McKinlay and Rolf Rasmussen have done a fair amount of work on java.awt (not ready for a screen shot yet, though).

August 3, 2000

Oskar Liljeblad has made the first release of gnome-gcj. This is a project to create a complete set of Gtk+ and Gnome bindings for Java using gcj.

June 27, 2000

A new Done with GCJ section was added. Send your GCJ stories here.

May 19, 2000

Today we merged some major work done at Red Hat. This included:

• Substantial work for the IA-64 port.
• java.beans from Classpath.
• A somewhat modified initial implementation of serialization. (This is known not to interoperate with other implementations yet.)
• Miscellaneous bug fixes.

May 2, 2000

Tom Tromey checked in the JNI stubs patch for gcj. This patch makes it possible to use compiled Java code where the native methods are implemented using JNI.

April 22, 2000

The new GCJ Projects page is brought online.

April 10, 2000

Warren Levy checked in a JDK 1.1 compatible version of Classpath's java.sql. Once we have merged the necessary JDK 1.2 support, we'll update this to directly track Classpath.

April 8, 2000

Tom Tromey wrote most of java.awt.event.

April 3, 2000

Anthony Green made RPMs of gcj and libgcj. See his original message for some caveats.

March 26, 2000

Hans Boehm contributed a port of libgcj to the IA-64. This port includes the interpreter.

March 15, 2000

Jon Beniston contributed the beginnings of a Windows port of libgcj.

March 13, 2000

Alexandre Petit-Bianco has checked in a change to the compiler to add support for most JDK 1.1 language features, such as inner classes.

March 9, 2000

Warren Levy checked in the basics of the java.security.* packages that he and Tom Tromey have been putting together. It is just the basics of java.security and some of it is indeed stubbed. It has been tried with the 20000120 snapshot of Cryptix JCE, so it is usable.
Please note that it is mostly JDK 1.1 based but there are some JDK 1.2 things included.

March 7, 2000

Bryce McKinlay checked in a change to both the runtime and the compiler which implements constant-time interface method lookup and type checking. This should provide a huge speed increase for programs that use interfaces or things like ``instanceof''.

March 6, 2000

We are relicensing libgcj to a more liberal license, and we're assigning copyright to the FSF. This will let us share code with the Classpath project.

March 2, 2000

Tom Tromey changed g++ to allow CNI code to catch and throw exceptions Java-style. This makes it much easier to write CNI code which calls Java methods that throw exceptions.

February 25, 2000

Anthony Green added an important optimization to gcj. His optimization eliminates redundant class initializations in some cases. It should speed up code which uses static methods or fields.

February 25, 2000

Hans Boehm has contributed an IA-64 libffi port. This is an important step towards getting libgcj to run on the IA-64.

February 16, 2000

We've done a lot since the previous announcement, but we haven't mentioned it here. Oops! Here are some of the things we've added: complete reflection support, Runtime.loadLibrary, Throwable.printStackTrace (this one is very cool), a Java implementation of java.math.BigInteger, JNI (believed complete but still in testing), and, of course, many bug fixes and more minor enhancements.

September 6, 1999

One year later... new web pages.

August 26, 1999

Libgcj 2.95.1 is released! This version corresponds to the GCC 2.95.1 release.