[ruby-talk:11731] Re: Interfacing with Java (sort-of)

"Conrad Schneiker" <[e-mail]> wrote:

>Hi,
>
>Is anyone familiar with low-level aspects of Java internals and whatever
>Sun's Java community license is?

I am not familiar with Java's internals, but here is a
synopsis of their Community Source License.  Here is our
source code.  Feel free to read.  If you make changes
you have to send them to us.  Unless we say you can, you
cannot distribute those changes to anyone else, tell
people about the bugs you fixed/enhancements you made,
and cannot even tell people about bugs you found.  Oh,
and you are not allowed to export this code to any
country whose intellectual property laws are not in our
opinion strong enough to make this stick...

>Are most of the basic Java libraries written in C? What I'm wondering is
>whether it would ever be feasible and reasonable to make use of various
>Java libraries (e.g. Swing, etc.) for cross-platform Ruby versions,
>without having to go through the JVM or through JNI stuff.

I believe that most are written in Java, and many have
optimized C versions for specific platforms, but will
default back to the slower Java versions elsewhere.
The specific instance I heard about is that they have
a very nice vector math package which on Solaris and
Windows has wonderfully optimized implementations that
play games like offloading calculations to your
graphics card.  But they refuse to let anyone write a
C version for Linux, making Linux look bad...

Anyways if you want to see the low-level internals of
Java, what I have heard is that you definitely want to
stay away from the SCSL - go download Jikes (C++) and
read that implementation instead.

Cheers,
Ben
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