I fail to see the point on writing open source software for Windows,
on windows we already have SUN's and IBM's java impl and I think noone
would care to have an free(from freedom) java impl.
On 5/10/05, Dalibor Topic <robilad@kaffe.org> wrote:
> Berlin Brown wrote:
> > Hello, I am not a JVM guru like the others, just a long-time Java
> > advocate and sit-back-and-watch Harmony person. I have a comment, I
> > know there will be a strong interest in getting an Apache backed
> > system on Linux/Solaris/Mac environments. It would be nice to see a
> > strong effort for Windows support. One of the key selling points of
> > Java is its portability. Having a Windows port would be key. And,
> > we all love to hate Windows, but it is pretty pervasive. It would be
> > nice if the Windows support was part of the initial focus and not an
> > after thought like some of the research Open-Source/JavaVMs that are
> > out now.
>
> Hi Berlin,
>
> I believe that mostly the reason why the current release of Kaffe has
> very little Windows support (just via cygwin) was the lack of big enough
> interest from developers familiar with and working on Windows. That, and
> the lack of some volunteer who cared enough to drive the issue to
> completion.
>
> I'm glad that you are considering volunteering to fix that problem:
> there are Kaffe ports to Cygwin, as well as a mingw32 port, and ports to
> WindowsCE platforms as well as DOS. You do not have to be VM guru to
> fix build problems, and there have even been patches floating around for
> Kaffe to make it build fine with MSVC++. On a side note, integrating
> MSVC++ into Kaffe's (and other autotools based) build systems should be
> fairly easy using cccl m4 macros, I've done this myself in a different
> project to have a single, automated build system.
>
> On the other hand, for all I know IKVM works great on windows already. :)
>
> > Also, I would suggest a port of C-Code Kaffe/GCJ JavaVM code to a
> > Microsoft backed compiler, possibly Visual C++ 6/7. Or at least
> > provide build support for the Windows platforrm.
>
> Get cygwin, get kaffe 1.1.5 tarball, get jikes 1.22 tarball. unpack
> jikes, configure && make && make install it, unpack kaffe, configure
it
> with --disable-native-awt (cygwin did not support gtk last time I
> checked) and --disable-sound (neither did it support ALSA or ESD) and
> --enable-pure-java-math (unless you installed GNU MP libs with headers).
> make, and pester me with bug reports :)
>
> The Cygwin patches to 1.1.4 from Gerrit P. Haase have been merged in
> before 1.1.5 came out, but when I tried out 1.1.5 a few weeks ago, I had
> some problems with Cygwin's make utility. On the other hand, cygwin is a
> fast moving target, and chances are the problems are fixed now.
>
> If you are interested in making it happen, hop on the Kaffe mailing
> list, or the irc://irc.freenode.org:#kaffe channel.
>
> cheers,
> dalibor topic
>
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