Free Java : is native code the way?

[Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer@pasteur.fr>]

I'm pleased to announce that I was successful in compiling the XML (hence the 
copy to debian-sgml) parser "xp" in native code with gcj.

This means that we can run any application built over this XML parser without 
a Java virtual machine (we have two such machines in 'potato', the non-free 
JDK and the free kaffe, which fails on this parser, bug #51263).

This withdraws a serious objection against Java ("Java is not really free 
since we depend on Sun's virtual machine") and another one against XML ("All 
the XML software is written in Java and therefore not really free").

Thanks a lot to the gcj team, I hope you will go on!

Technical details:

gcj fails on many Java constructs, and cannot compile "xp" directly. I had to 
compile with jikes (which is a free program, also), and use gcj to convert 
bytecode to native code. The entire sofwtare chain is free. Here is the nice 
command line to build the executable :-)

ezili:~/infosystems/XML/Java> gcj --main=UnTag UnTag.java UnTagHandler.java 
/usr/share/java/repository/org/xml/sax/helpers/*.class 
/usr/share/java/repository/org/xml/sax/*.class /usr/share/java/repository/com/j
clark/xml/sax/*.class /usr/share/java/repository/com/jclark/xml/parse/*.class 
/usr/share/java/repository/com/jclark/xml/tok/*.class 
/usr/share/java/repository/com/jclark/util/*.class 
/usr/share/java/repository/com/jclark/xml/parse/base/*.class

Next step: compiling the "xt" XSL processor, which is built over "xp". It 
doesn't work at the first try, which means everything is not done yet.