From: Charles Oliver Nutter <charles.nutter@...>
Date: 2008-11-20T16:02:09+09:00
Subject: Re: JRuby on Android (from: What would you like to know about Jruby?)

Florian Gilcher wrote:
>> - The code would either need to be always interpreted or precompiled, 
>> since we can't generate Java bytecode on Android at runtime.
> 
> Okay, this was the first problem I ran into. But i had a hard time to 
> asses how far JRuby depends on this. So I lost interest (you know... fun 
> project). Do you think this is solvable in a clean way with not too much 
> of work?

I believe so. We'd just want to pull off the compilation and code 
generation bits into separate modules we load through reflection or 
something similar. I've thought through a few scenarios.

>> - Finally, we'd need a bytecode backporting tool if 1.5 bytecode was 
>> not acceptable. There are various "retro" tools that do a pretty good 
>> job.
> 
> I played around with some, but they were a bit troublesome. The biggest 
> problem is that they generate JVM Bytecode which is different from the 
> Bytecode the Android VM uses. There is a converter, but I had my 
> problems with that one, too.

Perhaps the SDK has improved since? Up until recently we had support for 
retroweaving in the JRuby builds, though we didn't actually test against it.

- Charlie