News history

News

• 1 May 2001 - Release 0.11
• April 2001 - Many bug fixes, much improved reflection code. I have run many Mauve tests and fixed many bugs that appeared there. We are now using the CVS versions of the Classpath .java files.
• 26 March 2001 - Russell Smyth has been helping me integrate kissme better with Classpath. This will allow us to stay up to date with Classpath with less work.
• 26 March 2001 - Russell Smyth has also expressed interest in porting kissme to the agenda, a handheld device that runs linux. We have done some work on this and hope to start in earnes when pthread support is present on the agenda.
• 26 March 2001 - The new garbage collection scheme is in place, it will be contained in the next release.
• 26 June 2000 - A posting I made to the classpath mailing list:

  Just a quick note on the functionality of kissme. 
  
  It currently runs many console Java apps, the most complex of which is the
  kopi/kjc java compiler. It does file and net operations as per a normal
  JVM. I have recently worked a lot on the reflection capabilities, they are
  pretty complete. The garbage collector works (although it's a primitive
  mark/sweep collector). The VM supports JNI 1.1 and does allow dynamic
  linking to shared libraries. 
  
  AWT support isn't working, I've tried to get it going with the classpath
  code, but I never have any luck. Is there anyone who would like to help me
  work on this?
  
  I'm working on an experimental run-time optimiser that translates Java
  bytecodes to i386 assembly and then to machine code, so far this is very
  much in development though. 
  
  There are some bugs related to a class referring to its own type while
  executing a static initialiser. 
  
  On the whole though it's pretty solid, much of that is thanks to
  the native code from Classpath!
  

• 26 June 2000 - Release 0.07. Includes support for GC with native threads. Also new hooks for the cavalry optimiser. Lots of work done on the reflection code. Download kissme-0.07-source.tar.bz2 from the Sourceforge project page. Requires classes-2000-06-28.zip (also on the same page)
  
• 31 May 2000 - Release 0.06. Binary release for whoever wants to try it out. Now supports GC with native threads. Download kissme-0.06-i386-linux-binary.tar.bz2 from the Sourceforge project page. Requires classes-2000-05-xx.zip (also on the same page)
  
• May 2000 - Changed build system to not use autoconf and automake anymore, it's simply not flexible enough for what I want to do. I have started writing my own simple make utility in Java, it will be used to build the next release.
  
• May 2000 - Started compiling kissme against the OSKit again. After fighting with linker problems for ages I finally built a kernel, but it crashes on execution and I can't scroll back to see where the trap occurred. Will have to get a serial cable to debug it.
  
• April / May 2000 - Made major progress with the Just-In-Time translator (now called cavalry). It currently can translate about 60% of the java bytecodes to machine code, including the more difficult ones which invoke functions, access fields, do branches etc. The next step is to do exception handling, which looks pretty daunting. Also have to implement the switch statement (yuck). There are also major architectural problems in the sense that the JVM is currently using Java stack frames that grow upwards, but native C stacks grow downwards. This means it is a real problem to call between the optimised and interpreted methods. I might change the JVM to have all its stack growing downwards.
  
  The translator has been completely rewritten in Java and now uses an x86 Assembler also written in Java. I might release the assembler separately after some more work on it.
  
• 13 March 2000 - Release 0.05. Changed to support autoconf and automake for builds. Preliminary work on a JIT bytecode to nativecode translator. Simple persistence functional. Download kissme-0.05-src.tar.bz2 from the Sourceforge project page.
  
• 17 February 2000 - I'm releasing 0.04, most significant is the native threads implementation. I've made two binaries (native threads and green threads) and a tar.bz2 of the source, you can find them at the Sourceforge project page.
  Note you have to download the kissme.zip class library
  
• 1 February 2000 - I'm working on a native threads implementation which should allow more functional io. This should allow us to run web servers etc.
  
• 20 January 2000 - I'm fixing up the garbage collector to work without evictions to a persistent store
  

John Leuner - jewel.removeforspam@pixie.co.za
5 August 2000

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