Port coordination?

[Tom Rodriguez]

core wasn't removed, it was just redefined.  Previously core attempted 
to be a pure interpreter only system which meant that it didn't include 
anything needed by the compilers.  This made maintenance of it a bit of 
pain because anytime to made changes the related to the compilers in the 
runtime you had to remember to ifndef CORE them.  Now core is just a 
system without a compiler but still including the classes needed by the 
compiler like nmethod so it's slightly less minimal.  Basically not 
defining COMPILER1 or COMPILER2 gives you core and the core makefile 
targets should still work.

tom

Gary Benson wrote:
> 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