Jikes is an open source

Open source

The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...

 Java compiler

Java compiler

A Java compiler is a compiler for the Java programming language. The most common form of output from a Java compiler is Java class files containing platform-neutral Java bytecode...

 written in C++

C++

C++ is a statically typed, free-form, multi-paradigm, compiled, general-purpose programming language. It is regarded as an intermediate-level language, as it comprises a combination of both high-level and low-level language features. It was developed by Bjarne Stroustrup starting in 1979 at Bell...

. It is no longer being updated.

The original version was developed by David L. "Dave" Shields and Philippe Charles at IBM

IBM

International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...

 but was quickly transformed into an open source project contributed to by an active community of developers. Initially hosted by IBM, the project was later transferred to SourceForge

SourceForge

SourceForge Enterprise Edition is a collaborative revision control and software development management system. It provides a front-end to a range of software development lifecycle services and integrates with a number of free software / open source software applications .While originally itself...

. Among its accomplishments, it was much faster in compiling small projects than Sun's own compiler, and provided more helpful warnings and errors.

While the free software community

Free software community

The free-software community is an informal term that refers to the users and developers of free software as well as supporters of the free-software movement. The movement is sometimes referred to as the open-source software community or a subset thereof...

 needed free Java implementations

Free Java implementations

Free Java implementations are software projects that implement Oracle's Java technologies and are distributed under free software licences, thus making them free software...

, the GNU Compiler for Java became the most commonly used compiler.

Project status

the project is no longer being actively developed. The last 1.22 version was released in October 2004 and partially supports Java 5.0 (with respect to new classes, but not new language features). As no further versions were released since, Java SE 6 is not supported.

External links

• Jikes Homepage
• Jikes RVM Homepage
• Jikes Archives, hosted by David Shields on WordPress.com
  WordPress.com
  WordPress.com is a weblog hosting provider owned by Automattic which opened to beta testers on August 8, 2005 and opened to the public on November 21, 2005. It is powered by the open source WordPress software...