[armedbear-devel] Building with gcj

[Mark Evenson]

On 9/30/13 0234 , David Creelman wrote:

[…]

> I'm able to run ABCL under Java on Debian (testing) with no troubles (using
> ant or build-abcl.lisp with a few changes).
> However, I'm stumped about how to use gcj to make an exe.

The current ABCL codebase targets the JRE 1.5 runtime.  [The gcj info 
pages][gcj] state that gcj currently targets the JRE 1.2 runtime, and 
has no support for AWT/Swing.  Is this statement still correct?  I 
*think* it might be possible to get ABCL compiled by gcj, but it will 
take some hacking on the source tree to remove parts not supported by GCJ.

[gcj]: http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcj/Limitations.html#Limitations

> I'm wanting to use the exe on a site that doesn't have java, but will allow
> server exes.

I have had recent success with using [launch4j][] to create Windows 
executables which contain their own JRE which does not need any of the 
Windows registry settings.  Somewhat surprisingly to me, a fairly 
unencumbered re-distribution of the ORCL JRE is allowed under current 
licensing.  I had promised Erik to investigate ways this could be 
incorporated into the standard ABCL build process, but have yet to get 
the time to address this.

[launch4j]:  http://launch4j.sourceforge.net/

>
> For a normal Java build, on Debian I needed to change the script a little so that the java and javac exe
> were found at /usr/bin/java, rather than /bin/java. Perhaps this could be made into
> a defconstant/defparameter?

The current canonical build process via Ant does not make use of any 
DEFCONSTANT/DEFPARAMETER, but is controlled but the settings in 
'abcl.properties'.  The location of 'java' and 'javac' are derived from 
the current executable path of the Ant process but may be overriden in 
via setting the right properties.

> If someone has built ABCL with gcj and could point me to some docs I may have missed
> or some information that may be missing, but is in someones head or a custom
> build script, please let me know.

Anyone?


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