Java on Angus Thinks

Mac OS X will still have Java in the future.

Tue, 26 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

There has been lots of stuff written recently about how Java on the Mac has been deprecated.

The reality is that one particular Java runtime has been deprecated: the one that Apple write themselves. Java as a language will still be available, only it won’t be Apple that writes it and possibly it might be an optional download.

The confusion is because up until now there has really been only one Java runtime on the Mac, which Apple wrote themselves using code licensed from Sun. Now Apple has chosen to discontinue their own particular runtime, but this doesn’t mean that there won’t be any Java at all.

building antlr 2.7.7 on Mac OS X

Sat, 28 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

It appears that antlr on Mac os x doesn’t like the jikes compiler, at least when I tried building antlr it gave lots of weird compile errors like this: Found 2 semantic errors compiling "ANTLRException.java":

While it would be a good thing to try to fix the actual code, it’s easier to see if the solution is already available.

The answer came in this posting which suggests renaming jikes before building. Which works, but there is an easier way. Just declare an environment variable before starting the build.

Java class file version numbering

Sat, 21 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

http://alumnus.caltech.edu/~leif/opensource/bcver/BcVerApp.html

This page has a list which shows how java class version numbers relate to java platform version numbering. It’s useful if you get one of those UnsupportedClassVersionError errors.

This relates to the Java ClassFile structure which defines how classes are represented.