GCC Might Finally Drop The GNU Compiler For Java (GCJ)

[chrisr]

And I see what you're getting at but API reimplementation is protected under fair use.

As I understand it, APIs used to be considered uncopyrightable in the first place because they were purely functional. It is the "Oracle vs Google" case itself that has now found that APIs to be protectable under copyright. And the "fair use" defence only applies to the Java APIs because Google won the latest round in Court.

My point here is that GCJ has been doing exactly what Dalvik has now done, and for almost as long as Java itself has existed.

[coder111]

I'm a bit sad to see it go. For all it's warts, it is (was?) the only open-source tool that can compile Java to native executables. It was possible to build Java GUI apps with GCJ+SWT and have them as native binaries, and launching quickly, and running quite well.

With GCJ compile to native, java software would start up MUCH faster than with JDK. Actual execution performance of course was slower- JDK is VERY VERY good at doing JIT and generally runs at only ~1.3x slower than C.

[s_j_newbury]

I worked on Gentoo integration with GCJ to enable it's use as a fully capable Java 5 VM/JDK. The code never made it to Gentoo proper largely due to my lack of maintenance, which was itself due to the fact that independent GNU Classpath development pretty much ground to a halt with the merge with OpenJDK. GCJ is terrific technology, really, from a Linux distribution point of view, meta-or-otherwise it makes much more sense to compile Java code to native, the problem was the abandonment of GNU Classpath. Java5 maintained relevance for some time, but the world has moved on now. The GCC developers can't be blamed for this, they did their part. Nobody stepped in to merge changes from OpenJDK back into GNU Classpath, and anybody who cares about this is equally to blame as myself for not having done so.

[peppercats]

As I understand it, APIs used to be considered uncopyrightable in the first place because they were purely functional. It is the "Oracle vs Google" case itself that has now found that APIs to be protectable under copyright. And the "fair use" defence only applies to the Java APIs because Google won the latest round in Court.

My point here is that GCJ has been doing exactly what Dalvik has now done, and for almost as long as Java itself has existed.

I'm going to guess that Sun was more forgiving than Oracle.