IKVM.NET Weblog

Several things conspired to make me realise that it would be a good idea to make an official release based on OpenJDK. While it is technically still a hybrid with GNU Classpath (it uses the AWT / Swing implementation from GNU Classpath 0.95), I don't consider this a big problem due to the fact that AWT support in OpenJDK itself still has holes in it as well (due to the "encumbrances") and the fact that IKVM never officially supported AWT / Swing (and still doesn't). This snapshot has been well tested and the disclaimers no longer apply. Please download it, play with it and report any issues you find (either here in the comments, on the mailing list or to me directly). I will hopefully release the first 0.36 release candidate at the end of next week.

In the past I was never able to give a list of the areas of GNU Classpath that worked or not, because I simply was't familiar enough with the large code base to know which parts were of good quality / compatibility and which weren't. With OpenJDK I can at least say where IKVM diverges from the OpenJDK code. So I've made a list of packages / classes that are not fully implemented or not supported.

The entire public API is available, so "Not implemented." for javax.print, for example, means that the API is there but there is no backend to provide the actual printing support. "Not supported." means that the code is there and probably works at least somewhat, but that I'm less likely to fix bugs reported in these areas.

In addition to the issues listed above, the extended charset providers are not included (the ones in charsets.jar in the JRE) and enabling assertions is not implemented.

This snapshot is still based on OpenJDK B13, because the closer to 1.6 the better in my opinion. After the 0.36 release, I will start tracking the OpenJDK development version more closely, but I plan on supporting 0.36 for a relatively long time (even after 0.38 and subsequent IKVM releases).

I've updated the Japi results. The scores are obviously very high now, but there are still some differences. Some differences are due to OpenJDK B13 already containing some new 1.7 APIs, some differences are in the AWT / Swing GNU Classpath code and some are Japi bugs (e.g. the java.util.concurrent differences).

Changes:

• Renamed IKVM.Hybrid.GNU.Classpath.OpenJDK.dll to IKVM.OpenJDK.ClassLibrary.dll and made OpenJDK build the default.
• Fixed thread creation to use AccessController.doPrivileged() to get ikvm.apartmentstate system property.
• Fixed AccessController.getStackAccessControlContext() to use "native" method as marker on the stack for privileged operation (because the native method stub may get inlined away).
• Added default security policy file to VFS.
• Integrated OpenJDK java.beans package. Included OpenJDK sun.io package. Included OpenJDK sunw packages (for JDK 1.0 compatibility).
• Don't create TypeWrapper instances for HideFromJava types.
• Added rmi skeleton classes.
• Integrated OpenJDK java.nio package.
• Changed ikvmres protocol handler to be compatible with both GNU Classpath and OpenJDK url parse exception throwing convention.
• Switched GNU Classpath AWT/Swing back to version 0.95.
• Copied GNU Classpath version of java.text.Bidi into openjdk directory.
• Copied and integrated GNU Classpath's pure Java zip support with OpenJDK zip classes.
• Added GNU Classpath 0.95 compatible versions of awt\font.cs and awt\toolkit.cs.
• Refactored system properties initialization.
• Changed ikvm.exe class library version printing to report both GNU Classpath and OpenJDK versions.
• Added HideFromJava to AnnotationAttribute type member that can potentially use HideFromJava types.
• Implemented Thread.dumpThreads() and Thread.getThreads().
• Added a couple more fake native libraries to VFS.
• Implemented Thread.WaitUntilLastJniThread() (used by JNI method DestroyJavaVM() to wait for all non-daemon threads to end).
• Implemented Inet4Address.isReachable().
• Implemented path canonicalization.
• Create java.lang.ProcessImpl streams via FileDescriptor instead of going through FileChannelImpl.
• Added support for StructLayoutAttribute annotations.
• New FileChannelImpl implementation based on OpenJDK.
• Added map.xml workaround for java.net.DatagramSocket.receive() bug.
• Implemented DatagramSocketImpl.peek() and peekData().
• Don't add KeepAlive to constructors of objects that don't have finalizers and extend cli.System.Object.
• Implemented sun.net.dns.ResolverConfigurationImpl "native" methods.
• Added map.xml workaround for OpenJDK java.beans.XMLDecoder bug.
• Fixed sun.nio.ch.DotNetSelectorImpl to make "infinite" blocking select block for Integer.MAX_VALUE instead of returning right away.
• Fixed sun.nio.ch.Net.writeImpl() to return IOStatus.UNAVAILABLE if the socket is in non-blocking mode and the write failed because of this.
• Added workaround for .NET 1.1 Directory.Delete() bug.
• Updated all Java versions to 1.6.

Binaries available here: ikvmbin-openjdk-0.35.2791.zip.