Re: Ant

["Anthony Green" <green at redhat dot com>]

Jason wrote:
> Any plans to add ant(http://jakarta.apache.org/ant/) to RHUG?

Not right now.

> Before I jump in and start it myself I wanted to see if there was a reason
it
> wasn't already there.

Well, I'm not sure exactly what the value would be.  Admittedly, I'm pretty
ignorant about Ant - so please let me know where I'm going wrong.

IIRC, Ant invokes Sun's javac compiler via it's java interface
(com.sun.tools...?? - or something like that).  This has the advantage that
once you've started Ant, calling the compiler is relatively quick because the
VM is already running.  We won't be able to use this same interface for javac,
which means every invocation of Sun's compiler will mean starting the VM -- a
relatively slow process.  So compiling Ant to native code doesn't seem all
that compelling on the surface.  Are there other ways Ant is used in which it
is a win?  Maybe for people using jikes?

Don't let this stop you though!

Thanks,

AG