Java News from Wednesday, March 12, 2008

The Gnu Project has released version 4.3 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 1.5 level with some omissions. New features in 4.3 include:

• gcj now uses the Eclipse Java compiler for its Java parsing needs. This enables the use of all 1.5 language features, and fixes most existing front end bugs.
• libgcj now supports all 1.5 language features which require runtime support: foreach, enum, annotations, generics, and auto-boxing.
• The old jv-scan tool has been removed. This tool never really worked properly. There is no replacement.
• gcjh has been rewritten. Some of its more obscure options no longer work, but are still recognized in an attempt at compatibility. gjavah is a new program with similar functionality but different command-line options.
• grmic and grmiregistry have been rewritten. grmid has been added.
• gjar replaces the old fastjar.
• gjarsigner (used for signing jars), gkeytool (used for key management), gorbd (for CORBA), gserialver (computes serialization UIDs), and gtnameserv (also for CORBA) are now installed.
• The ability to dump the contents of the java run time heap to a file for off-line analysis has been added. The heap dumps may be analyzed with the new gc-analyze tool. They may be generated on out-of-memory conditions or on demand and are controlled by the new run time class gnu.gcj.util.GCInfo.
• java.util.TimeZone can now read files from /usr/share/zoneinfo to provide correct, updated, timezone information. This means that packagers no longer have to update libgcj when a time zone change is published.