[fedora-java] Drop GCJ AOT bits for F11?

[Conrad Meyer]

On Thursday 20 November 2008 09:00:50 am Andrew Haley wrote:
> Andrew Overholt wrote:
> > * Andrew Haley <aph at redhat.com> [2008-11-20 11:33]:
> >> Andrew Overholt wrote:
> >>> Back when we wrote the initial Java packaging guidelines, we said that
> >>> packagers *should* include GCJ AOT bits.  Should we remove this
> >>> requirement for Fedora 11 and beyond?
> >>>
> >>> Also, GCJ is still in the base install set for Fedora.  Should we
> >>> remove this and make OpenJDK a default?
> >>
> >> This is a bit premature.  We still don't have the OpenJDK JIT for PPC
> >> and ARM arches.  We're working hard on it but it's not ready yet for
> >> prime-time. Without the JIT, OpenJDK is crushingly slow on these arches.
> >
> > Should Smolt stats on architecture users affect this decision?  It says
> > about 0.7% of users are on platforms without OpenJDK JITs.
> >
> > http://smolts.org/static/stats/stats.html
>
> I was hoping to be able to keep all arches going with gcj until a
> really first-rate OpenJDK solution was available everywhere.  I don't
> think we want to make the useers of these arches into second- class
> citizens: Fedora ARM, in particular, is great for mobile devices and
> hasn't been supported for very long.  I think its usage will increase.
>
> Sure, the number of users is low, but on lower-performance boxes the
> penalty of not having gcj and gcj-compiled packages available is quite
> severe.  I wouldn't object to weakening the "should" to a "may" where
> aot-compiling is a problem.  Even without precompiled applications,
> gcj is still a lot faster than the OpenJDK C++ interpreter.
>
> Andrew.

I'm also for keeping gcj (for now). OpenJDK is great where it JITs but it's 
miserable on PPC (e.g. my laptop). I think the guidelines could say something 
about "if you run into a problem with a non trivial fix compiling gcj AOT 
bits, it's ok to drop the aot bits".

Regards,
-- 
Conrad Meyer <konrad at tylerc.org>