IcedTea's OpenJDK Passes Java Test Compatibility Kit

emyar writes "At JavaOne in May, 2006, Sun Microsystems announced they were going to release Java as free software under the terms of the GPL. The size of the task (6.5 million lines of code) was only eclipsed by the size of the opportunity for Java as a free and open technology. [...] This week the IcedTea Project reached an important milestone — The latest OpenJDK binary included in Fedora 9 (x86 and x86_64) passes the rigorous Java Test Compatibility Kit (TCK). This means that it provides all the required Java APIs and behaves like any other Java SE 6 implementation — in keeping with the portability goal of the Java platform."

Comments

Re:Language Compatibility vs. Class Libraries

[jalet]

> I wish that someone would create a non-bloat version of the Java class libraries. Do an analysis
> of important use cases, redesigned the class libraries to be much less "fluffy"

Somebody did just this already.

Re:Really ?

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot the corrolary to Moore's Law, Which is Gates's Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.

Re:Perfomance

[Reverend528]

IcedTea only had to implement the 4% of Java that wasn't GPLed.

Although 4% doesn't sound like much, it's actually just short of 8 billion lines. It sounds unbelievable that they could accomplish that so quickly, but Java's strength is in making it easy to write large amounts of code.

Re:Really ?

[Jesus_666]

Does this mean it consumes 2 GB of RAM to display "Hello World" ???

So does C(++) because of all the memory leaks, every BASIC dialect because of interpreter overhead, Dotnet/Mono because it includes half of Windows, Python and Ruby because of all the objects, Lisp to store all the braces and Perl just because it can. PHP doesn't because nobody has tried it yet. ASM also doesn't because it always drops the processor back to 8080 emulation mode and can't address 2 GiB of RAM.

The One True Language, beloved by all (Objective-C) also uses 2 GiB of RAM for "Hello World", but just because it needs to use that memory to cure cancer and feed starving children.