[DotGNU]Portable.NET News 5 Jan 2001

[Rhys Weatherley]

I haven't acheived much on the Portable.NET front this week.
I've been doing some offline JIT experiments and so very
little has changed in the main pnet tree.

After discussing it with the DotGNU SC, the proposal is
to turn the native code JIT into a separate "libjit" library.
This library will be as independent of the main pnet code
base and IL-specific features as possible.

With this approach, other Free Software projects that are
building VM's and CPU emulators will be able to use the JIT
without dragging the rest of pnet into their system.  More
on this once my experiments get a little further along.

If you have experience working with non-x86 CPU's like
PPC, Sparc, etc, then I definitely want to hear from you.
I'm only familar with x86, and so will need help porting
"libjit" to other CPU's.

My plan is to put out an official pnet and pnetlib update this
weekend, with all of the changes up to the end of last year.
Then I'll jump back into the C# compiler next week.

In other news, we now have the the excellent class status page
put together by Gopal V. and friends.  Fantastic work guys!

http://www.dotgnu.org/pnetlib-status/

[Aside: it seems that our idea to use the "TODO" attribute to
tag unfinished items in pnetlib is so popular that Mono is now
copying what we did.  Without acknowledging where they got
the idea from, of course. :-)].

There has been quite a lot of interest in building a Java
language front-end for the C# compiler lately.  Bradley Kuhn
of the FSF is currently taking the lead on this project.  He's
very busy though, so if you want to help out I suggest you
contact him at "address@hidden".

There is also a lot of interest in other aspects of Java/JVM
support in DotGNU.  I'll start a new thread so that we can
crystalise the issues into a concrete list of projects for
people to tackle.

Cheers,

Rhys.