alt Hacker NewsDon't forget GCJ. It wasn't removed from GCC until about 2016, a nearly 20-year long run, though interest had waned many years prior.
I don't remember if GCJ supported loading and running code dynamically with a built-in JIT or interpreter. I think it was just pure AOT, which caused some compatibility headaches.
Replies
cyberax • yesterday at 7:30 PM
Yeah! I used it around 2003 to integrate a Java PDF parsing library into our C++ app.
Its biggest downside was the use of Boehm GC that had some issues with large heaps.
GCJ was great - I wrote a handset UI entirely in java for a startup in the early 2000's, basically android before android existed, using GCJ. I remember their native interface was somewhat more convenient to use than JNI.
I wish we had GCJ resurrected, now that the java libraries are GPL'd.