Thomas Hallgren wrote:
> Well, yes. But use the word environment in singular please :-) To my
> knowledge the security is full-proof with all other VM's since they
> all use the standard runtime libraries.
It's not quite as simple as that. There are a bunch of VMs and a bunch
of libraries (and a bunch of compilers), and they can be combined in
many permutations. Not all of them work with PL/Java at the moment,
but we should not hardcode support for just one of them.
> The GCJ support is as
> experimental as the GCJ in itself and cannot be trusted in
> production.
You should not say that too loud when someone from Red Hat is
listening. :-) To my knowledge GCJ is Ready(tm) as of version 4.0.
And it's being used. Distributions such as Fedora and Ubuntu will ship
(or do ship?) with everything compiled using GCJ to the extent
possible. And there are people, in particular at or near Red Hat, who
have been specifically charged for several years now to make sure that
every piece of Java code out there compiles with GCJ.
Regarding the security issue: Word from Andrew Haley of Red Hat is that
it has simply been too much work to implement security up to now. This
should not affect the judgement of the quality of GCJ, it's simply a
missing feature.
Of course, I don't intend to undermine your judgement as the author
about what you consider experimental or not, but you should expect that
if you put your code out there, people will use it in whatever way they
see fit, and in particular with whatever Java toolchain they see fit.
--
Peter Eisentraut
http://developer.postgresql.org/~petere/