Port coordination?

[Gary Benson]

Jonathan Springer wrote:
> Pieter Libin wrote:
> > nowadays it seems that quite some people/organizations are working
> > on various ports of the j2se platform.
> > However, porting the virtual machine to new architectures requires
> > the writing of quite some non-trivial platform specific code (os,
> > os_cpu dir).
> > I think it would make sense to provide a more portable replacement
> > for this native part.
> > This would help porting the j2se platform a lot, and might make
> > the transition from j2me > j2se easier as well
> > (http://www.news.com/8301-13580_3-9800679-39.html).
> >
> > Does anyone know wether such a mechanism could be technically
> > feasible?
> 
> To support the compilers (c1, c2), there's just no getting around
> the need to describe how to generate code for a specific
> architecture.  Maybe you could do something outlandish like call
> gcc every time you wanted to generate a blob, but....
> 
> You could come a lot closer with something interpreter-only using
> CC_INTERP, though still there is asm for some things.  Unfortunately
> the CORE target was removed around b12, and it would be some work to
> get it back.

The core stuff is actually mostly still there: I use it for IcedTea
on PPC, which is as you say interpreter-only with CC_INTERP.  Have
a look in icedtea-ports.patch, the stuff to do core builds is all in
there.

Cheers,
Gary