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There was talk of porting Java to NetBSD - looks like it's already been done!

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	id AA23875; Wed, 3 Jan 96 17:12:16 EST
Message-Id: <9601032212.AA21235@bart-savagewood.MIT.EDU>
To: java-port-bsd@portia.com
Subject: netbsd java port:  already done (!)
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 03 Jan 1996 13:27:34 +0100."
             <199601031227.NAA17925@nietzsche.bowtie.nl> 
Date: Wed, 03 Jan 1996 17:12:14 EST
From: Marc Horowitz <marc@MIT.EDU>
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Well, I might as well declare this a fait accompli now :-)

I've already done (finished, completed, it runs applets) a port of
hotjava for netbsd 1.0 based on the alpha3 sources and pthreads.  This
was a substantial amount of work (2-3 months), and I had Chris
Provenzano sitting next to me for the harder parts.  I have a CVS
branch with a few thousand lines of diffs to integrate into the
pthreads mainline.  I ripped the sun source tree apart and put it back
together again to facilitate multiple ports. This was all completed
about 3 months ago.  Oh, and it works on linux and solaris, too :-)

The remaining issues are:
 - you can't dynamically load native methods because the netbsd ld is
broken.  If people want the details so they can work on this, I'll
provide them.
 - To statically link motif, I need to do some gross things by hand.
This needs to be automated.
 - performance.  it's kinda slow.  Someone else here has an idea why,
and hopes to be able to work on it.
 - beta.  This concerns me, because I find the beta source license
excessively draconian.  When I have time, I hope to have some counsel
look over it and tell me what it really means.

The sources as they stand are decent, but need some release
engineering before they are useful to other people.  I could probably
be convinced to distribute them, but the legal issues of someone else
taking my code and using it to modify the beta are onerous at best.
If the legal issues went away, I'd do it myself.

There's one little, nagging issue: the reason that this hasn't been
widely distributed is because I became a student again in September,
and I've been working on my thesis pretty heavily since, to the
exclusion of all my discretionary free-time projects, including java.
It's due at the end of january, and I expect it to be done earlier.
At that point, I expect to finish the work I began.

One final note:  I'm busy right now.  I'm sending this note so people
don't have to reinvent the wheel, since it's a hard wheel to build.
I'll be monitoring this list, and when I have a distribution, I'll
announce a site where people can get it.  Please don't send me email
directly, and ask others you tell about my work to do the same.
Thanks.

		Marc

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