Java News from Wednesday, May 16, 2007

The Gnu Project has released version 4.2.0 of GCC, the GNU Compiler Collection. GCC contains frontends for C, C++, Objective C, Fortran, Ada, and Java as well as libraries for these languages. GCC's Java is a clean room implementation 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. Java changes in this release are fairly minor. In particular, "A new command line option -static-libgcj has been added for targets that use a linker compatible with GNU Binutils. As its name implies, this causes libgcj to be linked statically. In some cases this causes the resulting executable to start faster and use less memory than if the shared version of libgcj were used. However caution should be used as it can also cause essential parts of the library to be omitted." In addition, fastjar is no longer bundled with GCC, so you'll need InfoZIP.