Re: VMInterface addition: Make native library names part ofVMInterface

[Sascha Brawer]

Andrew Haley <address@hidden> wrote on Thu, 6 Nov 2003 10:28:24 +0000:

>> [having the VMInterfaces classes clearly marked as 'special'
>> would make it easy for VMs and compilers to just inline all calls
>> to them]

>It's not particularly difficult to do, but at the moment we don't do
>it.  gcj is perfectly capable of whole-program Java optimization but
>we have to follow Java rules, and one of those rules is that you
>cannot inline final methods because it breaks binary compatibility.
>We could teach gcj that VM<foo> classes are an exception to that rule,
>but I think you would agree that's not a pretty solution.

Apparently, Java 1.5 will have "meta-data" (arbitrary, uninterpreted
declarations for language constructs that are represented in bytecode and
accessible via reflection), similar to CLI/.NET. This might be a much
cleaner approach for declaring such exceptions. Of course, the free
compilers would need to support it first.

-- Sascha

Sascha Brawer, address@hidden, http://www.dandelis.ch/people/brawer/