Re: [abc-users] Soot and abc to move to Java 5

On 2/25/07, Eduardo S. Cordeiro <cordeiro@dcc.ufmg.br> wrote:
> This is probably off-topic but as I understand your message it seems
> that you are moving to Java 5 in the Soot and abc code. Is there a plan
> on supporting Java 5 (and AspectJ 5 -- without the ugly annotation
> syntax) features on these tools?

No that's certainly a valid question. Our plans are as follows...

First of all Soot already fully supports Java 5 bytecode and so does
abc. This means you can process Java 5 bytecode and also weave into
it. However, we currently have no frontend yet to parse Java 5 source.

We are currently in the process of changing the abc frontend to
accommodate the Java 5 syntax. In the long term, the plan is that abc
will then also support full AspectJ5, i.e. including pointcuts to
match on annotations and generic types, etc.

Once this new frontend for abc is finished, I hope that we will be
able to pull it down into Soot so that Soot can parse Java 5 source
code as well. But for this probably depends on whether there is
sufficient demand for this. Personally, I don't quite see why one
would need to have Soot support Java 5 source, in particular because
it supports Java 5 bytecode already.

> PS.: the first item on your list states that Soot and abc will *not* run
> under Java 5 or higher JVMs. This is just a typo, right?

Yes, sorry about that.

Thanks for your interest.

Eric

-- 
Eric Bodden
Sable Research Group
McGill University, Montréal, Canada