Kaffe

Last updated
Kaffe
Original authors
  • Tim Wilkinson
  • Peter Mehlitz
Developer Transvirtual Technologies
Initial release1996;29 years ago (1996)
Final release
1.1.9 [1]   OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg / 22 February 2008
Preview release
1.1.10-pre [2]   OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg / 22 August 2011
Repository
Written in C and Java
Operating system Unix-like
Type Java Virtual Machine
License GPL-2.0-only
Website www.kaffe.org

Kaffe is a discontinued "clean room design" (reverse engineering) version of a Java Virtual Machine. It comes with a subset of the Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE), Java API, and tools needed to provide a Java runtime environment. Like most other Free Java virtual machines, Kaffe uses GNU Classpath as its class library.

Contents

Initially developed as part of another project, developers Tim Wilkinson and Peter Mehlitz founded Transvirtual Technologies, Inc. with Kaffe as the company's flagship product. In July 1998, Transvirtual released Kaffe OpenVM under a GNU General Public License.

When compared to the reference implementation of the Java Virtual Machine written by Sun Microsystems. It comes with just-in-time compilers for many of the CPU architectures, and has been ported to more than 70 system platforms in total.

Unlike other implementations, in the past Kaffe used GNU Multi-Precision Library (GMP) to support arbitrary precision arithmetic. This feature has been removed from release 1.1.9. The capability was removed to reduce the maintenance work, expecting that interested people will integrate GMP support into GNU Classpath or OpenJDK. Subsequently, GNU Classpath introduced GMP support in version 0.98.

See also

References

  1. "Release_1_1_9: updated docs for 1.1.9".
  2. "README: Kaffe 1.1.10-pre".