Previously, I used a shell script to extract modification date ranges
from the Git history, but that was complicated and unreliable, so now
every file just gets the same year range in its copyright header. If
someone needs to know when a specific file was modified and by whom,
they can look at the Git history themselves; no need to include it
redundantly in the header.
This commit ensures that we use the proper memory barriers or locking
necessary to preserve volatile semantics for such fields when accessed
or updated via JNI.
Unlike the interpreter, the JIT compiler tries to resolve all the
symbols referenced by a method when compiling that method. However,
this can backfire if a symbol cannot be resolved: we end up throwing
an e.g. NoClassDefFoundError for code which may never be executed.
This is particularly troublesome for code which supports multiple
APIs, choosing one at runtime.
The solution is to defer to stub code for symbols which can't be
resolved at JIT compile time. Such a stub will try again at runtime
to resolve the needed symbol and throw an appropriate error if it
still can't be found.
Whereas the GNU Classpath port used the strategy of patching Classpath
with core classes from Avian so as to minimize changes to the VM, this
port uses the opposite strategy: abstract and isolate
classpath-specific features in the VM similar to how we abstract away
platform-specific features in system.h. This allows us to use an
unmodified copy of OpenJDK's class library, including its core classes
and augmented by a few VM-specific classes in the "avian" package.
In order to facilitate making the VM compatible with multiple class
libraries, it's useful to separate the VM-specific representation of
these classes from the library implementations. This commit
introduces VMClass, VMField, and VMMethod for that purpose.
