Re: SableJIT and ARM

Philippe Laporte wrote:
> Hi,
>     I had issues with the JIT in another email and have yet to have 
> received an answer about that...
>
> In the mean time, should I understand that only David knows his way 
> around the JIT?

I assume he is the most reliable source of info.  David is a full-time 
developer now and I would guess his availability for new SableJIT work 
is low.  However, his thesis is probably quite good documentation.  I 
see that it is not yet on the web.

> The ports page does not claim ARM support for the JIT. Is that section 
> of the site up to date?

I'm not aware of any ports page describing SableJIT support besides 
David's personal homepage at:

http://www.sable.mcgill.ca/~dbelan2/

I also do not know how simple an ARM port would be, although SableJIT 
was designed to be retargetable.  You should check the availability of 
ARM ports of other open source JITs (note the distinction between JIT 
and VM) before committing to development of an ARM port for SableJIT. 
For example, there was work on JikesRVM, and a solution like JCVM, which 
was partially derived from SableVM, might also work, although I suspect 
the presence of Soot itself makes JCVM too big.  I don't really now 
about other systems like Kaffe and gcj but they are also popular.

Indeed, a summary of your comparison between the various open source 
Java projects would probably be valuable to both yourself and others.

I found two such comparisons on the web:

http://wiki.apache.org/harmony/JVM_Feature_Comparison
http://joeq.sourceforge.net/about/other_os_java.html

and of course there is the Classpath summary page:

http://www.gnu.org/software/classpath/stories.html

I would actually suggest making a new article about Free / open source 
Java and putting it in Wikipedia, complete with a comparison table.

In general, Planet Classpath is a good starting place for more info on 
other projects:

http://planet.classpath.org/

> (I'll get back into the CVS soon, promised...)
>
> Sable on ARM, how does it do in general? I've been assuming that it was 
> fine, but now looking again at the ports page I am getting confused. 
> Would be nice to update that info (I wouldn't have to defend Sable so 
> much...:-)

See http://sablevm.org/wiki/Porting :

Debian GNU/Linux
  arm (direct works, IT needed for inlined, possibly some other inlined
       specific issues)

You are free and encouraged to edit these Wiki pages.  For example, if 
you want to create pages on SableJIT support.

Cheers,
Chris

P.S.  Etienne, Greg: I get a "permission denied" message when I search 
for things in the wiki, whether or not I'm logged in with pwd guest.