I am sure there will be customers for the Mac OS X version of Excelsior JET. The point I was trying to make is that not all potential customers who say they would buy product X would actually do that when product X becomes available.

Of course, if they pay in advance, or agree to share the risks and profits, that’s a totally different story. Perhaps we could try to set up a foundation of some sort.

We may not sell a product that has not passed the TCK. There is an option to pass the TCK in so called “headless mode, that is, without display, keyboard, mouse or sound. So we could port the core and let you rely on SWT for GUI. However, all people who have expressed interest in the Mac port up to this day were using Swing…

I am in no way challenging your business intuition and market expertise.

Personally, I am now looking for oppotunities to optimize performance and deployment cost of OSGI-bundles on Mac OS X (and I don’t care about awt). However I have no data if there is a critical mass of guys like me to allow you pay the bills.

However all these things considered, I am not sure that Oberon/Modula compiler many years ago can form a solid ground for marketing analysis of Java AOT compiler today.

Furthermore (just a shameless dream) since reimplementing awt is very painful, maybe you can consider some flexible offering that allows to deploy certain stuff and yet not bearing the label “100% fully certified pure java”.

Many years ago, we were selling a much simpler and much more portable product – command-line Modula-2/Oberon-2 “via C” compiler. (It is now known as XDS-C and is available as freeware.) We had versions for Windows, Linux, Sun OS, even Ultrix. And we have been receiving inquiries like “I would buy your product if you port it to platform X.” So we did the port to that platform and did not sell a single copy.

Now, you know what? That “platform X” was Apple Macintosh.

Considering also my previous comment, we may not afford the risk on our own at this time, and there are not enough people willing to share the risk.

To put the long story short, the Mac port would be at least an order of magnitude more expensive than the Linux port we’ve done back in 2004.

If you guys can deal with SWT Cocoa and RCP stuff in a smart way, you’ll hit Mac OS market.

Btw, Java for IPhone is to be released this summer. Thus, a lot of developers will have an urgent need for slimming down their apps to deploy them on IPhone.

Pls, think about this.

Thanks!
James