Slashdot Mirror
Fast Native Eclipse with GTK+ Looks
Mark Wielaard writes "The gcj team created a natively compiled build of the Eclipse IDE. The resulting binary starts up faster then with any traditional JVM since there is no virtual machine to initialize or slow byte code interpreter or just in time compiler involved. This means that gcj got a lot better since the last Slashdot story in December about gcj and Eclipse. Red Hat provides RPMs for easy installation. Footnotes has screenshots by Havoc Pennington of the Eclipse IDE with GTK+ widgets."
GCJ uses the same backend as GCC (C/C++). Its code should therefore be as good or as bad as for that one.
The class library is certainly complete enough to write nice, crisp, fast and beautiful native GUIs with SWT.
The true question is: What can you do with GCJ?
The answer is: everything you can't do with the JDK, because the JDK starts up too slowly, because Swing suffers from obesity, and because both memory and disk footprints of the JRE are a disaster.
I tried those I remember somehow it didn't do anything :)
Do not confuse my stupidity with trolling!
I am a viral sig. Please help me spread.
"From your comments it's apparent you're not a Java programmer"
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Of course, I don't see myself as a "Java programmer" or a "carpenter" or a "brick layer". I wouldn't take any pride in that. I have a degree in computer science. The day you will get a college degree, or at least some formal qualification, you won't need to go around saying: I am a "Java programmer".
Otherwise, your arguments don't hold water: "startup times are not important", "size is not important". Who are you that you can say what can be important in someone else situation?
Because of the startup time issues you can't use Java programs in shell scripts. Now you're probably going to say that shell scripts are not important
Because of the size and footprint issues, you can't do embedded with Java. Now you're probably going to say that embedded applications are not important
Very good. You can use the JRE for things that don't need to start up fast, that can do with sluggish user interfaces, that cannot be used in fork(), and so on. Who's stopping you?
In the meanwhile, we can do everything that you can do and everything that you can't as well.
lose some of the advantages that the VM can provide you
And what were those anyway? We already had portable programming languages, the VM was just a silly idea, with an even sillier implementation.
I can't believe someone actually said "Hey, lets just compile for a machine that doesn't exist, and everyone can emulate that machine! I bet that will be fast and efficient!"
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.