Trying to free f2c
Hi,
since I'm really bored by the non-free f2c package which throws a
certain number of packages into contrib I checked again what we could
do. It seems the main reason why f2c is non-free is that it includes
goto_trans (non-commercial use, no fee). The code describes itself
as
JAVAB -- A prototype bytecode parallelization tool.
This tool can be used to exploit loop parallelism directly at
*bytecode-level* using the multi-threading mechanism of the JVM.
In addition, the tool provides some elementary support for the
automatic *detection* of implicit loop parallelism.
(see CVS[1]). The code that translates fortran code into java is GPLed
and as far as I can see we need this functionality. However, I can not
believe that these days Java compilers might need a tool that was
written in 2008 and has not changed like this to fullfill an
optimisation process that might be perfectly usable by a lot of
applications.
So my question is: Do we possibly rely here on a non-free tool that
is really not needed and we could simply drop it?
Kind regards
Andreas.
[1] http://f2j.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/f2j/f2j/goto_trans/README?revision=1.1&view=markup
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