[Mono-dev] JAVA is now GPL..

[Andreas Nahr]

Well first of all: nice move from Sun.

Of the list you named imho the only point that really provides a lot of 
possible value is for IKVM, because while Classpath got a lot better over 
time it still isn't complete, so switching to the "official" libraries could 
help a lot.

Some more comments inline

> Great, now mono can improve its JIT, AOT compilers and their garbage
> collectors with cross pollination from Sun's JVM..
> I say this because its now possible to access and share code with
> SUN's JVM, enabling the possibility of things like:
>
> - adopting/adapting Java SE garbage collector for mono

I'm not very knowledgeable in this field, however the implementation has to 
take into account things like fixed objects and pointers which aren't 
uncommon in the CLI, afaik java does not have to deal with this problem in 
this extent so the GC may be completely unusable for mono. And even if it 
would be usable this is no simple "drop-in" component but would still take a 
lot of work.

> - adopting/adapting Java SE JIT and AOT compiler technology for mono

IMHO highly unlikely. CIL and Bytecode are relatively different and CIL has 
a lot more "unique" opcodes than Java. The Java JIT also usually creates 
applictions with a higher memory-use that mono, so maybe Java should adapt 
the mono JIT ;) (imho also unlikely)

> - adapting JAVA JVM to run CIL directly, transforming mono in a
> framework/wrapper + CIL2javabytecode translator..

imho unlikely due to the reasons above.

> - adapting JAVA AOT and JIT compiler to produce/read CIL instead of
> java bytecode

I guess you mean javac because the JIT and AOT do not produce bytecode. 
Possible but I don't really see what would be the advantage of this.

> - creating a C# front end to JAVA AOT and JIT compiler...

C# for the Java JIT?

> - enhancing mono IKVM..
>
> I say this knowing that CIL and java bytecode probably do not map
> one2one, nor does java's frameworks or semantics, but besides this,
> they are similar in many respects, and its not that difficult to adapt
> a java bytecode compiler to a CIL compiler or vice-versa.. or a java
> parser to a C# parser.. for that matter... :)
> What I mean is: in terms of programming language pragmatics/theory,
> these two technologies/frameworks/languages are very similar, share a
> lot of problems and solutions..
>
> There is a lot of technology/code that can be shared..
>
> What do you guys think?
> Do you also see this has a good thing?
> Will there  be any palpable benefits for mono now that sun JDK is GPL ?
>
> just for the record:
> JavaSE:
> https://openjdk.dev.java.net/source/browse/openjdk/
> svn checkout https://openjdk.dev.java.net/svn/openjdk/trunk openjdk
> --username guest
>
> best regards,
>
> ps.: keep going strong
>
> --
> Miguel Sousa Filipe
>
>
> -- 
> Miguel Sousa Filipe
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>