Yesterday I made a templater to generate machine-specific files for OpenJDK. I’m not 100% convinced that all the files make says are missing are necessary — the portable interpreter is old code, and it’s possible there are files listed as dependencies that are only required for JITs — and I don’t intend writing assembler that isn’t used so the way I plan to proceed is:

• Every time make complains about a missing file, touch it.
• Every time something complains about a missing method or whatever, stub it.
• Every time a stub gets hit, write the real method.

The great thing about this is that the first two steps can be done in the templater. Nominally I’m only supposed to be getting it running on ppc, but there’s four other platforms that we care about and others that other distributions want. The idea is that the longer I can keep my work generic the easier individual ports will be.