[Haskell-cafe] Problems with building GCJNI 1.2

[Antony Courtney]

Hi,

Sorry for not jumping in on this discussion sooner.

I am the author of GCJNI.  GCJNI was developed back when Hugs was the
dominant Haskell implementation and GreenCard was the easiest/best way
to do foreign language bindings for Haskell because the FFI proposal
was still in the formative stages.

These days, the Haskell FFI addendum is stable and widely implemented,
ghc has become much more widely available and easy to install and use,
and (without wishing to sound harsh), GreenCard's FFI code generator
was broken and useless the last time I tried to use it (a few years
ago).

I actually ported GCJNI to the Haskell FFI a few years ago, getting
rid of ALL use of GreenCard.  I used ghc's 'hsc2hs' tool to help with
the marshalling, and made no attempt to port to hugs.  I called this
newer system 'hsjni'.  It worked very well for my needs (using the 
Java2D rendering engine as the back-end for a prototype Haskell GUI 
system).  I never released hsjni simply due to lack of time while 
finishing my thesis.

I invested a little effort in trying to test hsjni with the latest JDK
and get a release together in December, but it got snagged on a silly
little bug in hsc2hs's handling of paths which have embedded spaces.
A minor bug, to be sure, but since the default installation location for 
the JDK under Windows is under "C:\Program Files", the bug meant hsjni 
couldn't work out-of-the-box for the most common installation of the 
prerequisites.  Simon Marlow has since fixed this bug in CVS head;  I'm 
just waiting for the next release of ghc with this fix available before 
I try again.

If you think you'd be interested in having a shot at building 'hsjni'
(or you are interested in maintaining it), let me know, and I'll make
the sources available for you.  Caveat is that I haven't tested it
since JDK 1.3, because of this hsc2hs issue.

My appologies for not mentioning any of the above on the GCJNI web page. 
  Hopefully the whole GCJNI release and web pages can be deprecated 
soon, with hsjni offered in its place.

Kind Regards,

     -Antony

-- 
Antony Courtney            email: antony at aya.yale.edu
New York, NY                 WWW: http://www.apocalypse.org/~antony