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A comment on Minimal PDF. Parent comment

Re:Minimal PDF by amluto on Monday July 10, 2017 @01:36AM (#14733626)
pdftk is a sort-of-C++ program that contains code like:

  #include "pdftk/com/lowagie/text/pdf/PdfReader.h"
  ...
                  if( input_pdf_p->m_password.empty() ) {
                        reader= new itext::PdfReader( JvNewStringUTF( input_pdf_p->m_filename.c_str() ) );
PdfReader is actually java/pdftk/com/lowagie/text/pdf/PdfReader.java in the pdftk source distribution. Yes, this is a C++ program that's instantiating a Java class. As far as I can tell, what's actually going on is that all the Java code is compiled to C++-ABI-compatible .o files using GCJ and pdftk.cc links against them, giving a native program that is nonetheless mostly written in Java. Yikes!

Perhaps unsurprisingly, GCJ didn't get a huge amount of traction, and it has been deleted from the GCC tree entirely. Good riddance, maybe, but it makes it rather difficult to compile pdftk.

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Re:Minimal PDF by jbn on Monday July 10, 2017 @11:31PM (#14741386)
Someone should port all that C++ code (there's not that much of it, really) to Java, that would make it a lot easier to compile, wouldn't it?
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