Re: Eclipse 3.0 Running ILLEGALY on Kaffe
On Thu, 2005-13-01 at 15:58 -0500, Raul Miller wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 13, 2005 at 03:19:36PM -0500, Grzegorz B. Prokopski wrote:
>
> > http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#IfInterpreterIsGPL
> >
> > "However, when the interpreter is extended to provide "bindings" to
> > other facilities (often, but not necessarily, libraries), the
> ...
> > Do you understand that an interpreter for Java IS such an interpreter
> > that provides "bindings" to other facilities?
>
> But was Kaffe _extended_ to provide such bindings for Eclipse 3.0?
This FAQ entry discusses 2 cases. One is when we have an interpreter,
that basically goes over the pseudo-code and purely "interprets" it
(an old BASIC interpreter would fit here). No Java VM/interpreter
_ever_ fits in this first, simple casse.
Second case is where the code being interpreted may request to access
bindings provided by the JVM. In Java these are done thru JNI calls,
so usually JVM itself is a JNI library that provides these bindings.
So an interpreter has to be "extended" to provide these "bindings" to
other facilities. In such case, as the FAQ states "the interpreted
program is effectively linked to the facilities it uses through these
bindings."
> Or is Eclipse 3.0 using only the facilities which Kaffe provides for
> arbitrary byte code?
There is nothing in the FAQ that would suggest that these "facilities"
have to be provided for a specific program.
On the contrary. A Java Virtual Machine (Java interpreter) inevitably
has to provide such bindings to support Java specification. In other
words the interpreter itself has to be extended with a library that
provides these bindings to support Java specs. There's plenty of these
bindings required to exist in core java.lang.* classes.
Hope this clarifies the issue,
Grzegorz B. Prokopski
--
Grzegorz B. Prokopski <gadek@sablevm.org>
SableVM - Free, LGPL'ed Java VM http://sablevm.org
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