I originally posted this on G+ but I thought maybe I should expand it a little and archive it here.

The patch to delete gcj went in recently.

When I was put on the gcj project at Cygnus, I remember thinking that Java was just a fad and that this was just a temporary thing for me. I wasn’t that interested in it. Then I ended up working on it for 10 years.

In some ways it was the high point of my career.

Socially it was fantastic, especially once we merged with the Classpath community — I’ve always considered Mark Wielaard’s leadership in that community as the thing that made it so great. I worked with and met many great people while working on gcj and Classpath, but I especially wanted to mention Andrew Haley, who is the single best debugger I’ve ever met, and who stayed in the Java world, now working on OpenJDK.

We also did some cool technical things in gcj. The binary compatibility ABI was great, and the split verifier was very fun to come up with. Per Bothner’s early vision for gcj drove us for quite a while, long after he left Cygnus and stopped working on it.

On the downside, gcj was never quite up to spec with Java. I’ve met Java developers even as recently as last year who harbor a grudge against gcj.

I don’t apologize for that, though. We were trying something difficult: to make a free Java with a relatively small team.

When OpenJDK came out, the Sun folks at FOSDEM were very nice to say that gcj had influenced the opening of the JDK. Now, I never truly believed this — I’m doubtful that Sun ever felt any heat from our ragtag operation — but it was very gracious of them to say so.

Since the gcj days I’ve been searching for basically the same combination that kept me hacking on gcj all those years: cool technology, great social environment, and a worthwhile mission.

This turned out to be harder than I expected. I’m still searching. I never thought it was possible to go back, though, and with this deletion, this is clearer than ever.

There’s a joy in deleting code (though in this case I didn’t get to do the deletion… grrr); but mainly this weekend I’m feeling sad about the final close of this chapter of my life.