More Java guidelines questions

[Callum Lerwick]

On Wed, 2008-04-16 at 09:10 +0200, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> Le Mer 16 avril 2008 01:12, Jesse Keating a écrit :
> > On Tue, 2008-04-15 at 18:10 -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
> >> Do you have an estimate for the man-hours of modifications it took
> >> to
> >> make that possible to help others decide on the feasibility of using
> >> gcj
> >>   instead of Sun Java in general?
> >
> > I don't, but that's a moot point because Fedora couldn't ship Sun
> > Java.
> > I'd like to think that a lot of the work that went into GCJ aided in
> > the
> > push to get Sun to open up Java so that we /could/ ship it.
> 
> Sure, that was a good argument for pushing gcj in the past.
> The question is should we focus on gcj or openjdk/icedtea now.

IMHO the only reason Java bytecode exists is to make it possible to
distribute "run anywhere" proprietary software while keeping the source
code closed. Thus in an open source environment, Java bytecode has
little reason to exist. If we're going to *distribute* compiled code, it
may as well be nice fast native code.

Yes I know what you're going to say, lots of languages, such as Python
do bytecode as well. But they do it as a backend implementation detail,
with no guarantee of stability and stored on disk only as a performance
optimization, rather than an intentional mechanism for source code
obfuscation. IMO we, the open source community, should shun Java
bytecode.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 197 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://listman.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/attachments/20080427/d8279b4d/attachment.sig>