The community effort hosted by the Apache Software Foundation to create an open source, J2SE 5.0 compatible Java runtime/virtual machine is progressing slowly but steadily. Despite some indifference and prejudice by some OSS pundits, the project has been recently moving along nicely with key players like Intel and IBM contributing their own programmers and source code to the effort.
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2005-07-06
It has been discussed a lot on harmony-dev mailing list. If I remember correctly, they cannot open theit jvm because it contains a lot of sun code.
One could also argue that it would be better to start off with a clean slate so that all the features required can be built in from the ground up rather than them being tacked on at the last minute.
Atleast if everything is designed from the ground up, all the features and considerations can be taken into account so that the different parts of the VM can be properly documented, designed to be easy to maintained and most importantly, when it comes to porting to other platforms such as FreeBSD, 300 hoops won't need to be jumped through as with the case of the current situation of JVM.
The idea situation would be to replicate the Java classes and use the mono VM.
Member since:2005-11-15
One could also argue that it would be better to start off with a clean slate so that all the features required can be built in from the ground up rather than them being tacked on at the last minute.
Atleast if everything is designed from the ground up, all the features and considerations can be taken into account so that the different parts of the VM can be properly documented, designed to be easy to maintained and most importantly, when it comes to porting to other platforms such as FreeBSD, 300 hoops won't need to be jumped through as with the case of the current situation of JVM.
Sounds like a good description of IBM's J9 VM (from what I've heard).
Member since:
2005-08-06
If IBM wants to contribute something, why don't they open source their jvm?
It has been discussed a lot on harmony-dev mailing list. If I remember correctly, they cannot open theit jvm because it contains a lot of sun code.
Anyway, recently SableVM [ www.sablevm.org ] has been relicensed to Apache Software License [ASLv2] and will now be part of harmony.