[Swarm-Support] pretest 9 / Sun JDK

[Marcus G. Daniels]

Hi all,

Swarm is working with Sun JDK again.

The problem was with Tcl.  Tcl does a stack probe to ensure that 
recursive calls can be completed, but this stack probe causes problems 
in the JVM environment.  So I disabled the probe, and put a variant Tcl 
DLL in
/Swarm-2.2/bin to override the Cygwin version. 

The previous problem of Cygwin laying down shared memory space for its 
bookkeeping no longer causes problems with Sun JDK 1.4.2.  So, rather 
than adding a feature to Cygwin to make it the virtual memory address of 
that area configurable, or changing the value, I will simply say that if 
you want to use Swarm and Java under Windows, use the latest version of 
Sun JDK (1.4.2).  In my limited testing, 1.4.2 and pretest 9 are working 
reliabily together.

The new pretest at 
ftp://ftp.santafe.edu/pub/swarm/binaries/w32/latest/Swarm-2.2-pretest-9.tar.gz.

Before using this pretest, run the Cygwin setup program and update your 
Cygwin DLL and anything else the installer suggests.  You don't need 
`experimental' versions of the Cygwin stuff or anything like that.  If 
you had a Cygwin install that worked with earlier Swarm pretest (e.g. 
you were using it for Objective C only), simply have it grab the 
standard updates.  Cygwin developers are doing a mass upgrade of 
packages lately to accomodate new 64 bit file access features in the 
Cygwin.  I realize that this isn't yet advertised on the Cygwin website, 
but it's true.

Finally, this pretest doesn't have a working Kaffe (standalone free Java 
JVM).  I will probably withdraw Kaffe support from the next release 
because 1) it doesn't work with Cygwin (and I don't have time to fix 
it), and 2) most Java folks find Kaffe weird anyway and prefer to use 
commercial development tools.    For folks that want freely 
redistributable Java support, there will be gcj.  I noticed that gcj 
broke with my last round of Cygwin/GCC upgrades, but it probably just 
requires a rebuild of libgcj (something that takes about all day).  So, 
if you want GCJ support use pretest 8.  If you want Sun JDK support, use 
pretest 9.  If you want both, lend a hand.  :-)