2014/07/10

DISCLAIMER: These notes are from the defunct k8 project which precedes SquirrelJME. The notes for SquirrelJME start on 2016/02/26! The k8 project was effectively a Java SE 8 operating system and as such all of the notes are in the context of that scope. That project is no longer my goal as SquirrelJME is the spiritual successor to it.

I modified the hairball shell script to force out of tree builds since that is better for the directory state, easier to clean and less chance of trashing it. I believe the current plan I am going to go for is to have roughbuild build a cross compiler, then build hairball with it. This way most of hairball and whatever else may be in Java 8 rather than Java 5. The compiler could cross compile to an older version of Java. The most important thing needed is the compiler anyway, once that is compiled I am free. Or rather, perhaps build hairball and the compiler on older stuff. The remainder of everything else will be specifically for the target, however some utilties will need to stay behind to support some things on the host VM. Although another alternative would be to build the compiler, then make a micro vm which can run Java 8 byte code on versions before it (if the current version is not 8). Another alternative is to make a class downgrader, but the compiler could do that already. So at the minimum and I should stay minimum, just make the compiler and hairball then be done with that.

Need to switch PackageParser to use a Reader instead along with making the finder classes I talked about the other day.

I should also make a CacheMap class which I use like a Map but wraps put and get in a SoftReference. However, I would need to make a layered map implementation because of extensions due to the actual element value kind being wrapped in a SoftReference always.