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Blackdown Java for PowerPC Status

The question whether Blackdown is working on a PowerPC JDK keeps resurfacing.

Yes, we are working on porting HotSpot and J2SE 5 to both ppc and ppc64!
There is no sponsor for this port, so nobody is working on it full-time currently. That means work is progressing slowly (but steadily), not much is working at this point.

This article Jürgen Kreileder is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

3 Comments

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Stephan Michels said

These are great news, that at least someone working on it. I have a Mac Mini at home, which is more or less useless, because I can’t develop my Java projects on it, which are using Java 1.5 Features.

A big thank you and the people of the Blackdown team from me.

For what it’s worth, Kaffe also has a ppc jit that needs someone to invest a bit of time to fix the issues exposed by our jit test suite. That should not be too hard for someone familar with ppc assembler, and it should give you a 10 time performance boost over the interpreter, which works very nicely, although slowly on ppc-linux and ppc-darwin.

A hotspot-like (and comparable on performance) engine from a Kaffe fork called Latte would also be available for picking up and fitting into the current code, if someone volunteers to do it right now.

First experiments of on using 1.5-ish features on Kaffe have been successful, but yeah, good code does not write itself so if you are intersted in hacking on an open source implementation, hop onto irc://irc.freenode.org:#kaffe .

cheers,
dalibor topic

Jacob said

How much money would it approx. take to get 1.5 ready?

Regards,
Jacob