Open vs Closed java on linux (was: Re: [Nottingham] What distro?)

[Michael Erskine]

On Thursday 25 May 2006 10:23, Martin Garton wrote:
> Okay, point taken - I hadn't tried debugging. It was perfectly usable
> for the couple of days I used it though, editing, compiling and running
> code at an acceptable speed.

I struggled along with it for a few days before throwing in the towel and 
using the Sun JRE. I even sort of knew what I was doing on this occasion!

>   If convenience is your aim, it's definitely the right choice.

People resort to the beaten path rather than being on their own in the woods. 
Some will venture into the woods never to return and those on the beaten path 
believe they have been eaten by wolves. As it turns out, somebody had built a 
fantastic futuristic highway a little way through the woods and those people 
had zoomed ahead. The LUG is your well-armed escort to get you through the 
trees...

sigh! I was daydreaming a bit there!

Back to the point in hand; an Open Java. I took a quick look at the GCJ 
mailing list and bugs list for the first time in ages and it seems that 
there's been some progress but it's still way too far from the Sun to rise 
above near absolute zero... OK, bad pun

The problem being that everybody already fixed and tuned their Java apps to 
run on the Sun implementation (sound familiar? just like a certain nasty 
little OS!). A couple of years ago I wrestled with 1.3 Blackdown for 3 
fruitless weeks before resorting to deploying a Sun JRE. When GCJ is ready, 
everybody will be able to switch seemlessly... erm, except for everything 
they aren't going to implement, e.g. the show-stopper for my company: JNI -- 
I don't want to reimplement everything in CNI.

Regards,
Michael Erskine.

-- 
Kids, don't gross me off ... "Adventures with MENTAL HYGIENE" can be
carried too FAR!


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