Hacker News Reader

Comment by keyist | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised that IcedTea (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icedtea ) has not been mentioned yet.

From the link:

"On June 2008, it was announced that IcedTea6 (as the packaged version of OpenJDK on Fedora 9) has passed the Technology Compatibility Kit tests and can claim to be a fully compatible Java 6 implementation."

I'm not a Java developer -- is there something about the project that makes it less appealing than a fork from scratch?

View on HN

My personal anecdotal experience from using it on Ubuntu is that Iced Tea isn't as reliable or compatible with Java code as the Sun java. Maybe that's changed recently?

Definitely not true in my experience. The only difference I've noticed is that the Sun one forces you to manually download some jars in order to get strong crypto because of some outdated US legal BS, while openJDK bundles them.

The last time I used the openJDK on ubuntu was version 9.10 and then JGoodies LaF looked abysmal. Well, by abysmal I mean that the openJDK inserted spacing between most components and the sun JDK looked consistent with the rendering on Windows and AIX.

Hmm; I haven't done any GUI work with OpenJDK, but now that you mention it I do remember some caveats about the font rendering engine being one of the pieces that they were having difficult tracking down provenance on for open-sourcing.

That was true when it first came out; the version shipped with Ubuntu was the 1.6.0_0 version of Iced Tea, which had all sorts of problems. The latest version is fine.

For anyone who's curious, OpenJDK was (if I recall correctly) originally a fork of the early JDK7 code line, but with everything JDK7-specific stripped out. Originally it was fairly buggy, so the initial Iced Tea builds of Open JDK6 weren't really usable for production work, but since Open JDK6 was released most of the bug fixes that have gone into the official JDK6 have also been ported to OpenJDK6, so the current version is now fairly stable and should be comparable in quality to the official JDK.

It also has multiple backends. I think a debian dev had coded a llvm backend for it. And a cambridge student coded an ARM backend.

Edit : grammar. Also forgot to mention that the ARM backend run on n900, my precious.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com