This week on harmony-dev (Oct. 23 - Oct. 31 2005)

[David Tanzer <st...@guglhupf.net>]

I know I'm quite late this week, I'm sorry (Counter-Strike and lots
of beer got in the way ;-). Now here's what happend last week on the
harmony development mailing list. And, just because this paragraph is
off topic anyway: Happy Helloween!

In the thread "Some questions about the architecture" Robin Garner
clarified that Weldon Washburns post about a GC-VM and his own post
about the MMTk interface are just examples of existing interfaces and
that both could be improved. In the same thread Robin and others
responded to an earlier post by explaining some aspects of finalizers.
Mark Wielaard wrote about about a similar problem in GNU Classpath
(The problem in all these cases is that some code relies on finalizers
to be run). Archie Cobbs mentioned that this problem could be solved
by creating a new vm method which would "try hard" to run finalizers,
but this could cause other problems.
[http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-harmony-dev/200510.mbox/%3c60261.208.54.15.1.1130041463.squirrel@sqmail.anu.edu.au%3e]
[http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-harmony-dev/200510.mbox/%3c44897.208.54.15.1.1130042645.squirrel@sqmail.anu.edu.au%3e]
[http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-harmony-dev/200510.mbox/%3c1130593101.11930.20.camel@localhost.localdomain%3e]

There where more questiones about how to "Get involved on Harmony",
and Dan Lydick, Geir Magnusson Jr. and others where explaining how
the others could get involved. Mark Wielaard provided some interesting
links and tasks for getting started. Leo Simons wrote a mail with the
subject "Leadership and direction" where he clarifies how we (should)
work together. Others involved in these discussions: Ashwin Stuart and
Graham Smith. Normally the links I provide here are starting points
of the threads, but the following links are to the posts which describe
how to get started in the project. I think they are more interesting in
this case.
[http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-harmony-dev/200510.mbox/%3c1130595694.11930.54.camel@localhost.localdomain%3e]
[http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-harmony-dev/200510.mbox/%3c1130609850.11930.80.camel@localhost.localdomain%3e]
[http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-harmony-dev/200510.mbox/%3c20051031091444.GC32031@localhost.localdomain%3e]

In the thread "Compilers and configuration tools" Tanuj Mathur
offered to help supporting the MSVC compiler. Dan Lydick asked if
it's nessessary to support mulitple compilers and which problems
could be created. Rodrigo Kumpera mentioned the following problems:
assembly sintax, compiler extensions and c++ libraries nuanses.
There was some more discussion in this thread (about the free
availiability of compilers, what "free" actually means, and such
things). The conclusion was that we should at least support GCC,
that we won't stop people from working to support other compilers.
Dan Lydick offered to replace his configure/compile shell scripts
with Makefiles, which he did later this week.
[http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-harmony-dev/200510.mbox/%3cf611554c0510240244v737862b7v2121d1d67b267fa1@mail.gmail.com%3e]
[http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-harmony-dev/200510.mbox/%3cf611554c0510250647jeb50b3ax9b0b4d317587160a@mail.gmail.com%3e]
[http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-harmony-dev/200510.mbox/%3c4120051032634210170@earthlink.net%3e]

Dan Lydick and Robin Garner where discussing more aspects of
Garbage Collection, Memory Management and managing Objects and
Classes in "Questions about GC implementations". Robin mentions
that the object headers in bootjvm are too large (40 bytes), and
that the object table needs to go. He also pointed out some other
places which could become a performance problem in the future.
[http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-harmony-dev/200510.mbox/%3c43630F5A.3080407@anu.edu.au%3e]

Mark Wielaard wrote two replies in the thread "[legal] Bulk 
contribution barrier to entry". The first explained why people
who work on GNU Classpath have to sign a document which grants
the FSF copyright. The second post was an answer to and example
from Geir Magnusson Jr. where a lawyer lawyer flagged an obvious
implementation of an Exception class as a problem. Mark explained
that in court you could easily proof that this is the only obvious
way to implement such a class, but that the problem is that you
are in a situation where you have to proof this. He wrote that this
is the reason why "projects like GNU Classpath have a rule that you 
cannot study any proprietary implementation".
[http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-harmony-dev/200510.mbox/%3c1130590127.8000.21.camel@localhost.localdomain%3e]
[http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-harmony-dev/200510.mbox/%3c1130592129.11930.5.camel@localhost.localdomain%3e]

Jean-frederic Clere started the thread "[BootJVM] configure"
where he contributed configure files for BootJVM. He posted them
to JIRA: http://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HARMONY-10 later.
Jean-frederic and Dan Lydick also discussed some build problems
here. Mark Wielaard announced the release of GNU Crypto 2.1.0 and 
Jessie 1.0.1. In the thread "[dev-process] Coding Style Guide" Mark
recommended that other projects adopt the coding conventions used
in GNU Classpath for Java code which mimics the standard (GNU) C and 
C++ coding convention as closely as possible.
[http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-harmony-dev/200510.mbox/%3c43615007.80905@telefonica.net%3e]
[http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-harmony-dev/200510.mbox/%3c1130588374.8000.15.camel@localhost.localdomain%3e]
[http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-harmony-dev/200510.mbox/%3c1130594952.11930.41.camel@localhost.localdomain%3e]

Regards, David.

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David Tanzer, Haghofstr. 29, A-3352 St. Peter/Au, Austria/Europe
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