Jacks

Tom thinks that Jacks should be forked since development on it has stalled and no one seems to respond to any mails. Anyone checking out the Jacks CVS repository regularly or taking a look at the Jacks mailing list archives would also come to the same conclusion. Jacks is a fantastic testsuite but sadly has not kept up with the language constructs introduced in JDK 1.5 (or "Java 2 Version 5" or "Java 5" or whatever) and patches to fix this have been mostly ignored for some reason.

In fact, there seems to be a proposal to merge Jacks with Mauve. That would be really neat. I hope it is kept as a separate module within the Mauve CVS repository though, as compiler and runtime testsuites ought to be kept separate, in my opinion.

As an aside, I found that GCJX gives different results (as is to be expected) when run against Jacks and different values for the --source option. For example, the construct Object foo = 1; now seems to be valid due to automatic boxing. Perhaps Jacks should be modified to tailor the status of testcase executions based on the language level targetted by the compiler being tested. Or perhaps it can just target the latest language specification.

Talking of GCJX, a simple clarification I asked for on the GCC mailing list resulted in a big thread - thankfully, the patch I suggested to work around the issue was approved, so that the part of GCC used by GCJX can now be compiled by a C++ compiler once again.

(Originally posted on Advogato.)

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