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I've been searching for information about the state of GCJ and it's future but especially for the future was nothing to find...

Is GCJ dead?

Goonex
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    I sure hope it is. Don't get me wrong: it served its purpose well. But that purpose was never really "provide a production-quality Java environment". – Joachim Sauer Oct 19 '11 at 13:31
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    Out of interest, what do you want it for? (I'm not doubting the validity of your question, I'm genuinely interested!) – Rich Oct 19 '11 at 14:16

2 Answers2

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2016 Update: Yes, it's officially dead, as per this blog post.

Original post:

I haven't found any official sources saying so, but several places (such as here) point to it being in maintenance mode. Add that to the fact there's been no news updates since 2009, and no regular ones since 2007... on the contrary, the mailing list is still active and there's still talk around it.

So I guess my best guess would be "ish", it's certainly not seeing hives of activity but something minor appears to be going on. I wouldn't rely on there being any sudden rush of activity in the future though unless something drastic changes, my guess is it's winding down.

On a side note, I think its perceived necessity has diminished somewhat. Back in the day I knew of lots of people all wanting to compile Java programs natively rather than to bytecode, but now people seem to have realised that's almost always a bad idea :-)

Michael Berry
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    I'd like to have a reliable GCJ working on Linux and Windows. By now, to go native, the language of choice is C++. The "perceived necessity" is still there, in my opinion. This can be seen for instance in Android, where the number of native projects is growing. – Mister Smith Oct 19 '11 at 14:04
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    GCJ developer here. It's actively being maintained, but no real development happens on it these days. Sun eventually gave us OpenJDK, which solved the Free Software JDK problem. Many of the GCJ and GNU Classpath developers moved right over to OpenJDK hacking (via the IcedTea project). – Anthony Green Nov 25 '11 at 14:55
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Their mailing lists look active enough – it's possible work is being done to it without there being official announcements. That said, the last nontrivial changes to the Java frontend mentioned in GCC release notes were for GCC 4.3.

millimoose
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