Zero and Shark in IcedTea

Over the past few months I’ve been working on Shark in it’s own forest. This has allowed me to track upstream HotSpot (and the goal is to upstream Shark, so it’s the correct place to base it) but it’s meant that the Shark (and Zero) in IcedTea6 are old. I’m trying to update Zero and Shark in Icedtea6, but it’s a nightmare.

Zero in IcedTea6 has the ARM interpreter which can’t go upstream. Upstream has all the JSR 292 stuff which can’t go downstream. Between these two are fixes that need synchronizing, in both directions. One of the fixes, 6939182 (aka PR icedtea/323) requires the ARM interpreter to be updated before it can be committed, so that needs keeping separate… except that the changes to Shark to support that one are pretty invasive and hard to strip out.

It’s a real mess. I’m pretty close to giving up on it.

3 thoughts on “Zero and Shark in IcedTea

  1. Definitely hang in there! Please, your work is much appreciated, especially more relevant now, Sun long since dropped the ball on mobile CDC.

  2. Hi Gary! I hope you don’t give up :)

    @Peter OpenJDK full support for ARM would be definitely great, but there are a number of over the top alternatives to it, like all the VM based on OpenJDK or GNU Classpath, both with commercial support and not (Cacao, JamVM and – silly self promotion here – JamaicaVM), and most of them support CDC or the full J2SE.

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