[armedbear-devel] svn r12228 breaks build

[Mark Evenson]

svn r12228 breaks the ABCL build pretty badly, with (at least) mention 
of the non-existent 'LispTrampolinesFile', although there are other 
errors that may/or may not be corrected by the addition of this missing 
file.

I am neutral with the intent of the patch to introduce static imports 
for Lisp.java, although as I understand it this is merely a cosmetic 
change as it doesn't change the generated bytecode.  The use of the 
wildcard import bothers me a bit as the intent of the linkage is then 
implicit rather than explicit, but in truth this loses no more 
information that a call to "Lisp.foo()".  I find I tend to get confused 
about where the symbol is coming from (is it inherited?  is it from the 
import?), but maybe I am getting old and grumpy.

But as to the use of a trampoline, the last time I understand the 
proposal from David Miles, I was definitely against as requiring a lot 
of rather ugly looking boilerplate code to every Primitive without 
providing anything substantial in return.  I admit that  would need to 
re-study David's proposal a bit to come up with more concrete arguments, 
but at the level I understood it my negative assessment could be 
summarized by:  maintaining the trampoline linkages would be a good 
candidate for an automatic tool with access to the Java AST.  Without 
such a tool, we end up creating more work to maintain/undestand the source.

Therefore, I would advocate reverting svn r12228 for the time being, and 
at least separating the two issues of the static wildcard import of 
Lisp.java from the introduction of LispTrampolineFile.java.


-- 
"A screaming comes across the sky.  It has happened before, but there
is nothing to compare to it now."