Re: VMInterface addition: Make native library names part ofVMInterface

[Bryce McKinlay]

On Nov 5, 2003, at 5:56 AM, Jeroen Frijters wrote:

> Bryce McKinlay wrote:
> > Sorry, I think I misunderstood your message. I thought you were
> > suggesting moving all the native methods (eg for IO classes) to
> > separate VM* classes.
>
> I think that is in fact what Mark was suggesting and I think this is
> definitely a good idea. There are a lot of VMs that don't (want to) use
> JNI for their "native" methods. Having all native methods in the VM*
> classes makes this much easier.

On the other hand, too much abstraction increases the complexity of the 
classes, making maintenance more difficult. Even putting efficiency 
issues aside, I agree with Andrew - we would not want to do this in 
libgcj.

> This assumption is not true for some VMs. My VM (IKVM) has no native
> methods and I'm pretty sure this is also true for JAOS and maybe 
> others.

I think its a mistake for classpath to try to be everything for 
everyone, even at the expense of elegance and efficiency. At some 
point, most implementations are going to have to modify it in some way 
in order to suit their special/custom needs.

Regards

Bryce.