Re: question about vm/reference files

[Mark Wielaard]

Hi,

On Fri, Oct 19, 2001 at 08:58:58PM -0600, Eric Blake wrote:
> > The thought was that Classpath either would not provide the classes
> > that are VM dependent (leaving those to the VM) or that there would be
> > multiple directories (vm/gcj, vm/orp, vm/kaffe, etc.)  The ugly
> > complexity appears to be necessary.
> 
> That still doesn't explain why Object is in the top level when the other
> core classes are not.  Even if these classes have no Java
> implementation, it is still useful to have a .java file in Classpath for
> making the .class file which jikes requires for compilation purposes.

The original idea was that some of these classes were to VM specific to
include a generic Classpath version. Some classes have a VMXXX counterpart
that contains the VM generic code but since they do not have to have direct
access to

Now that we have some VMs that actually use Classpath as their standard
class library we can reevaluate the way we split these classes. Which
classes are really so VM specific that they cannot be implemented with a
VMXXX bridge?

What we could do is build two zip files, one with the standard classes and
one with the generic implementation classes (glibj-runtime.zip?) that each
VM should implement in their own VM specific way. (So this second zip would
be very small and contain the 'default' - noop - implementation of the VM
specific classes.)
Then those two zip combined could be used as input for compilers like jikes.
And each VM would have the generic zip file plus an vmspecific zip file in
its bootclasspath.

Cheers,

Mark
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