John D. Mitchell's Blog

Virtual Machine Archives

JPC: x86 Emulator on the JVM

Okay, I must be slipping... I can't believe that I've either totally missed this or completely forgotten about it:

At each JavaOne, I end up asking lots of people what, if anything, they've seen that's particularly cool, interesting, etc. This year, I was chatting with Cliff and he mentioned JPC -- an open-source emulator for x86 code.

JPC is written Java and so you can run all sorts of old DOS programs on any machine that supports the JVM. This includes a lot of old DOS games. [And now I feel old for playing too many of them when they were new.]

Hmm... I wonder if I can find some old GEOS disks and get it installed and running. :-)

GCC turns 4.0

The GNU folks have released version 4.0 of the venerable GCC compiler with built-in support for the C, C++, Objective-C, Ada, Fortran, and Java programming languages.

The biggest general change is the completely new intermediate language representation based on tree SSA. SSA (Static, Single Assignment) is a modern approach to the intermediate representation of the parsed programs which allows for a much more sane and aggressive approach to optimization.

On the Java front, the GCJ sub-project has made major improvements including better support of AWT and Swing and a lot more of the other Java libraries such as java.util.regex. If you didn't know, GCC can generate native (machine-specific) binaries directly from Java code.

Check out the ChangeLog for more details.

Java J2SE v1.5.0 FCS Released

Java J2SE v1.5.0, aka "Tiger", has been officially released by Sun.

Is this all that you hoped it would be?

If you could get rid of one thing from Java...?

In the spirit of If I could add one thing to Java, I'd like to know what one thing you would take out of Java, if you had the chance. Not add, extend, tweak, exchange, or change but just what you would get rid of completely.

"You know you've achieved perfection in design,
  not when you have nothing more to add,
  but when you have nothing more to take away." --Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Playing with Java v1.5 on Mac OS X

Sam Pullara has done some work to help people run some of the Java v1.5 features on Mac OS X. Note that his work is based upon the bundles made available as part of JSR-14 and is therefore a bit out of date relative to the official releases for other platforms (even more so when the next official beta is release in the next couple of weeks).

I don't know about you but I'm finding Apple's lackluster commitment to Java on Mac OS X a bit frustrating.

JSR 133 goes public

JSR 133 -- Java Memory Model and Thread Specification Revision has been released for public review. Note that the review period ends on March 7, 2004 so check it out and submit your comments sooner rather than later.

J2SE v1.5.0-alpha availability with JSR-166 updates

Rather than being forced to register at JavaLobby to be able to get access to the release, you can download the Java 2 SDK, Standard Edition v1.5.0 alpha release directly from Sun.

People interested in the JSR-166 Concurrency additions should note that the Tiger alpha release does not contain the latest version of the package. You can get the latest version from the JSR 166 resources web site.

Microsoft phasing out products which depend on Java

Microsoft is citing the settlement over Java with Sun as the reason that Microsoft is pulling the plug on a number of versions of various products. Here's an article from Eweek that goes into more depth on this.

I particularly like this bit of spin from Microsoft:

"We will not ship products that include a piece of software we can not provide security fixes for, thus we are phasing out some older products and re-releasing some older products without the VM. This applies to all channels." --Tony Goodhew, Microsoft Developer Division

Of course, this is also a good excuse for Microsoft to push customers to pay for expensive upgrades.

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