I’ve been trying to get the Mint compiler to work inside DrJava. This has turned out to be more tricky than I thought.
The preempting class loader that we use to load different compiler adapters is still giving me headaches, and the fact that the “Mint SDK” is only a partial JDK (really only a replacement for the tools.jar file) means that I can’t use the same mechanism that is used to load a Java compiler to make the Mint compiler accessible. Instead, the Mint compiler needs to find Mint and a matching JDK… What exactly matches? Oh, I don’t really know right now.
Additionally, on the Mac Mint requires SoyLatte. We haven’t tested it with Apple’s implementation of Java 6 yet. Running DrJava with SoyLatte means running it in an X11 environment, and that means more headaches…
And all of this would only get us to compile Mint programs in the Definitions Pane. In the Interactions Pane, we would still only have Java. I’ve worked on this for a week and a half now, and I’m still far from being marginally successful. I think I should be able to get the Definitions Pane to work on Windows and Linux. But is that worth it?