Hi Jose, José Fonseca wrote:
But supposing I want to help one of the honorable efforts you mention above, just by testing it and submiting the bug-reports (or even take a stab at it myself), exactly which of those (kaffe, sablevm, gcj, ...) should I try to use? This is a question I had asked myself before.
I'm obviosly biased, so I'd say kaffe ;) But I'm sure the developers of the other VMs would appreciate someone submitting bug reports as well.
Regarding the classpath library there seems to be convergency towards the Gnu classpath library. But which VM (of the so many out there) is the open-source community backing in full-weight?
None, as far as I can tell.The open-source community is busy making open source programs that work on Sun's JDK, and rarely cares enough about free runtimes to submit bug reports, or fixes. That's in large part caused by the (to an extent only perceived) incapabilities of the free runtimes to compete with Sun's offering in one way or another (features, stability, etc.).
It's a bit of vicious circle thing: the free runtimes can only get good enough to run cool apps, if people running & writing the cool open-source apps bother to test their apps with the free vms, and report bugs and if possible provide fixes for the bugs they find. But as long as the free runtimes are not percieved as good enough for running some app, the user base of that app has little incentive to consider trying it out on a free VM.
I know that competition is natural (and quite often favorable) in open-source. But I can't help thinking I may be backing the wrong horse, and my time spent on it be in vain.
We're competing on some aspects, and cooperating on others. If you want to avoid spending time in vain, put your time behind GNU Classpath, and not behind a particular VM.
cheers, dalibor topic