Java News from Wednesday, April 21, 2004

The Gnu Project has released version 3.4 of GCC, the GNU Compiler Collection. GCC contains frontends for C, C++, Objective C, Chill, Fortran, Ada, and Java as well as libraries for these languages. GCC is a clean room implementation of Java that doesn't use any Sun code, so it doesn't always exactly match Sun release versions, but this is roughly at the Java 1.4 level with some omissions. New features in Java in this release include:

• Compiling a .jar file will now cause non-.class entries to be automatically compiled as resources.
• libgcj has been ported to Darwin.
• libgcj has a new gcjlib URL type; this lets URLClassLoader load code from shared libraries.
• libgcj has been much more completely merged with GNU Classpath.
• Class loading is now much more correct; in particular the caller's class loader is now used when that is required.
• Eclipse 2.x will run out of the box using gij.
• Parts of java.nio have been implemented. Direct and indirect buffers work, as do fundamental file and socket operations.
• java.awt has been improved, though it is still not ready for general use.
• The HTTP protocol handler now uses HTTP/1.1 and can handle the POST method.
• The MinGW port has matured. Enhancements include socket timeout support, thread interruption, improved Runtime.exec() handling and support for accented characters in filenames.