On Wed, Sep 07, 2016 at 08:10:50AM +1200, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

GCJ, the GNU Compiler for Java, has been languishing for some time, and may be about to be put out of its misery.

Unlike the Sun/Oracle compiler, GCJ can compile to native machine code (thanks to the common GCC infrastructure), it is not restricted to some intermediate byte code. It originated before Sun open-sourced Java, and I guess a lot of the need for it went away when OpenJDK appeared.

Interesting. Debian used gcj to bootstrap openjdk-7 as openjdk depends on having a java compiler to compile itself. As gcj is buildable with gcc/g++ alone (I think, or does it need gcj as well, looks like it does need gcj to build itself) it provided a nice way to bootstrap full java support. It looks to me that Debian bootstrap openjdk-8 with either openjdk-7 or openjdk-8 so it would appear they have given up using gcj as the base java compiler to bootstrap the rest of the java support. Having an independent implementation of a compiler always makes it easier to re-bootstrap the specific language again. (And that can be necessary, particularly for less used architectures that struggle to keep up to date.) Cheers Michael.