Fosdem '05: GCC 4 + Java

At the pre-party drink I met up with Matthias Saou, who maintains freshrpms.net and is fairly knowledgeable about the current state of the Linux kernel and GCC. He told me that GCC 4 will soon be able to compile Java direct to native code, and not just as a kludge, but in a real, competent implementation.

This is absolutely fantastic if true, 'cos it means that I can directly compile my Tomcat to run on my VM. Right now I have like 6/128MB memory free 'cos the JVM allocs so agressively. This is very, very cool, especially if you consider that automatically deploying native compiles to GNU/Linux from an Ant script is no more complex or involving than doing the same to class files.