What next?

[Mike Hearn]

On Wed, 01 Jun 2005 14:09:06 -0700, Anthony Green wrote:
> Most of the improvements of late imply ABI breakage because we're
> extending the library in incompatible ways.  Restricting ourselves to
> non-ABI-breaking changes in GCC 4.0.x limits our ability to continue to
> demonstrate innovation.

Could you elaborate on that? In a private email exchange recently Tom
Tromey suggested that the ABI was stable (or very nearly stable) in that
apps compiled with GCJ 4.0 would run against a 4.1 system (but not
vice-versa unfortunately).

I'm afraid I'm also really convinced that breaking ABI constitutes
innovation, or even is required for it ... it's a clone of Java so at most
you would be adding new APIs which hopefully the ABI design allows for? 

I'm interested in this because I'm working with a guy who wishes to
distribute GCJ compiled binaries across multiple Linux distributions.
Obviously if you guys are chomping at the bit to break backwards
compatibility as soon as possible, I'll have to tell him to give it up (or
figure out some cunning hack where everything including libgcj is
statically linked/private).

thanks -mike