Limitations

This release of Magik on Java has the following major limitations (please note that this is not an exhaustive list).

Magik on Java compiler

• The following keywords cannot be parsed: _recursive
• The following keywords can be parsed, but do nothing: _private, _package

Magik on Java runtime

• Most, but not all, of the Core library is loaded.
• The runtime behaves as if !global_auto_declare?! is set to true.

If you want to see if an exemplar is loaded, you can enter the exemplar name at the command prompt and see if the result is unset. If unset, the exemplar isn’t available.

• There is no way of saving the state of a session.
• There are a few known java.lang.VerifyError that occur in the Magik to Java byte code compilation process, but there might be more that we aren’t aware of. So, please feed those back to us.

Magik console

• There are a number of limitations around the editing facilities in the Console.

Loading products and modules

Loading products and modules currently has the following limitations:

• Loading base_image in the released Core 4.3.0 product has been tested—other modules and TSB versions of Core 4.3.0 may not work and have not been tested. In particular, there are known problems with loading patches which use read_message_patch() which isn’t yet supported.
• Some modules are reported as loaded which aren’t actually loaded. This is needed to work round some outstanding language or low-level library limitations. The modules are:
• case_engines
• case_model_validator
• datamodel_engine
• profiler
• emacs_utils
• map_projections_catalogue

The source for these modules is not loaded so anything that depends on them may not run.

• Magik source code for various components in sw_common and sw_swaf that use the SWAF user interface is shipped, however, Magik on Java only supports the Swift User Interface toolkit. No testing has been done to check whether source code in sw_common and sw_swaf can be loaded.

Core modules not yet implemented

The following areas of the Core product are not yet implemented:

• Data marshalling
• Physical file access
• Datastore administrative functions such as hot backups

Some APIs don’t work yet, or give the wrong answer. As these libraries are so extensive, it is simplest to try things out and see if they work.

ACPs

Only the following ACPs are included:

• Simple XML — swxml_acp.exe
• Polygons — polygon_acp.exe

The Desktop Viewer currently has the following limitations:

• In this version, memory use has not been optimised; the application uses a lot of memory and may struggle on 32-bit machines (process memory limits) or slow machines. However, the Desktop Viewer runs successfully on a machine with 2GB of memory and a 2.2GHz Celeron processor.
• There is no way of saving the compiled application code or the details of the database—the code has to be loaded and the database opened for each session.

These limitations will be addressed in future versions.