IKVM.NET Weblog

Someone wondered why I chose to try to get Eclipse to run. Three simple reasons:

• Mark Wielaard posted his success story on the GNU Classpath mailing list.
• It's a complicated application and that really helps to find bugs.
• It doesn't require AWT. It will be quite some time before AWT will be done (if ever), so for the time being console (or SWT) applications are all I can use.

Status update: I've been doing a lot of rewriting in the verifier/compiler. I now feel that I finally understand class loading (in particular, what happens when a class is not found). In the verifier and in the compiler, class names are now no longer used, instead references to the TypeWrapper class are used to identify types. This isn't just a performance optimization, but also a requirement because class names aren't necessarily unique (only within a class loader). Still no support for different classes with the same name though, it's getting closer though.

The reason I started this rewriting, is to enable dynamic binding when a class isn't found. The current compiler just inserts a throw NoClassDefFoundError when it encounters a type that couldn't be loaded (and if the verifier needed to load the type, the whole method will just be replaced with code that throws a VerifyError). This is not what the Sun JVM does, it actually retries to load the class everytime the method executes. To simulate this behavior I'm going to emit late bound code in the cases where a class isn't available when the type is compiled. After all this is done, I should be able to run Eclipse without the -Xbootclasspath workaround.