Stuart commented:

On most aspects, you've convinced me. Just a few little comments:

wrt "throws Exception" vs "throws Throwable" - there's no difference. Any Java method can throw any Throwable subclass that isn't an Exception subclass, just as any Java method can throw any RuntimeException subclass. Thus "throws Exception" really does let you throw anything.

Actually, no. Try to compile the following:

class test extends Throwable
{
  public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception
  {
    throw new test();
  }
}

It doesn't compile. One of the inellegancies of Java's checked exceptions model is that there are two classes that removed the checkedness, both Error and RuntimeException.

Btw, are you arranging that (most? any?) .NET exceptions end up as subclasses of j.l.Exception, or just direct Throwable subclasses?

Throwable, the most important reason is that I don't want to mess with the class hierarchy, if at all possible.

I agree also that remapping things like InputStream is probably too hard. If you have a generic class/interface/method remapping system, though, I can imagine actually experimenting with Collection vs IEnumerable and indexers on List.

One of the goals of XML remapping system, is to enable exactly these types of experiments. It probably isn't flexible enough to do everything you'd want to do, but in the end we'll get there.

When you get IK.VM working on Mono I might even have a try at that myself, since it shouldn't need any deep magic in the VM itself.

I think it'll still be a while before Reflection.Emit in Mono is at the level where it is complete enough.

Oh, and I like the idea of custom attributes to do "throws" expressions on glue code. I wonder if we could persuade the Mono people to get mcs to actually honor the "throws" attributes - ie, compile C# code with Java's 'checked exceptions' semantics. That would be pretty cool :)

It would be cool, but I don't really like checked exceptions. After programming in Java (almost exclusively) for about five years, I finally decided that the cons outnumber the pros. The idea is compelling, but in practice there are too many problems, but I don't really want to start that war, as it has been waged many times already

BTW, I just changed the idiv, ldiv, irem & lrem implementations to explicity check for -1, and for a lame little test I wrote, performance seems to be OK (same as JDK 1.1 and slightly faster than JDK 1.4, HotSpot doesn't like microbenchmarks ).