[antlr-interest] GCJ

[Ric Klaren]

Hi,

On Mon, Jul 14, 2003 at 11:06:49PM +1000, Robert Colquhoun wrote:
> But does it do a correct compile?

So far I have no complaints about it. It is pretty defensive and tends to
compile a few files too many but it beats compiling all for me, also it
grabs along .g file dependecies and remakes which I personally like a lot.
When I started with antlr I pretty often had 'funny' results with standard
javac and dependencies (probably something long fixed since then). I guess
I'm a guy that likes to know for sure things are ok when he types in 'make' ;)

> As soon as you make a java change you need to recalculate the dependency
> tree using some tool.  That's not happening with the configure/make stuff
> at the moment there is only the original dependencies.

The deps don't change that often. The majority of people will install antlr
as a package and not develop/change stuff inside antlr. The java savy
people (or people that follow the instructions from install.html) will most
probably just use Ter's version, and/or their favourite java IDE.

The people used to unix/linux will see the configure and probably be able
to install stuff using that without too much glitches.

Of course it is a good point that the Makefile's don't regenerate
dependencies. So I agree that they are lacking with respect to that.

> How long?

Long enough for me to do it the way I did it, with the added bonus of
recompiling .g files, don't have exact figures at the moment.

> >After compress that java_deps file only amounts to 23k nothing to get
> >excited about ;) It is generated with Bob Werken's javad (which again uses
> >antlr) so I have faith in the quality of the dependencies.
>
> Yes but javad is *not* shipped with antlr....java_deps is out of date as
> soon as you make a change to the java code.

AFAIK java_deps only changed one or two times in it's history. There's not
much change to antlr's source tree with respect to dependencies. Again most
people will not be hacking antlr just look for a way to install the tool.

> I have been trying to get the java build tool to work better.

Nice :) I'm sure Terence will like any improvements to it.

> At the moment there is a nasty cyclical dependency between antlr.Tool and
> antlr.g.  The current build system assumes antlr.Tool classes and the Lexer
> and Parser classes from antlr.g are available to bootstrap the
> system....not sure if there is another way around this.

Maybe a bootstrap.jar could be added to the distro to fix this ? Dunno,
Terence probably has an opinion about it.

> I should also mention the configure/make system requires cygwin or similar
> to work on windows which makes it hard to use for windows developers who
> have no unix experience.

Something I can't do much about ;) Though the build of antlr does not rely
on the configure/Makefile stuff. Configure is not used to generate a
config.hpp in the C++ case. All steps necessary to build antlr or one if
it's runtimes is pretty straightforward and for at least the C++ part
documented, with the disappearance of the mkjar scripts the java part is
probably less clear. Then again antlr ships I think with a precompiled
antlr.jar so that should not be too big a problem.

Before the makefile/configure stuff was added most stuff was built using a
few simple scripts/batchfiles, the C++ part had no makefiles if I recall
right (maybe some stuff in contrib). The scripts did not handle
dependencies between the .g files and the java files, which the makefile
setup does (or should).

Although the configure/makefile built system might not be perfect, for me
it works very well, and it should be since I rely on it while working on
antlr. Indeed there's some friction between java and makefiles but I'm
willing to take that risk ;)

Cheers,

Ric
--
-----+++++*****************************************************+++++++++-------
    ---- Ric Klaren ----- j.klaren at utwente.nl ----- +31 53 4893722  ----
-----+++++*****************************************************+++++++++-------
  Wo das Chaos auf die Ordnung trifft, gewinnt meist das Chaos, weil es
  besser organisiert ist. --- Friedrich Nietzsche

 

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