Lightweight multiplatform Jython-launcher

The current situation is as follows:

On Linux the Jython-launcher is a hard to read and vastly unmaintainable sh-script, that is even said to be buggy. On Windows it used to be a similar situation with a bat-script that was recently replaced by a python-script. This is currently provided as an exe-file via py2exe and thus bundles the CPython interpreter as a dependency.

Is that weird? Jython bundles CPython just as a launcher? Yes, but it was - however - the only feasible solution within given time-constraints. First do things right...

Another downside of this solution is that on Windows a process cannot replace itself by another process. That means that Jython always runs as a subprocess of CPython.

This project is a sandbox for creating a new lightweight Jython launcher based on JNI (similar to java.exe). We will combine the sources of java.exe and CPython-launcher to produce a platform-independent launcher-source that will provide elegant and lightweight binary Jython launchers for Linux, Windows, OSX and other target platforms.

The launcher was not extensively tested yet, but supports almost all options and environment variables that jython.py supports. It is currently Linux-only, but a Windows-version is the next major goal. It has only been tested with Open JDK.

What not yet works: Should emit error message if jython.jar (or related) is not found.

As LiJy-launch inherits some code from the original Open JDK Java-launcher, it is released under the same license as Open JDK, which is GPL v2 with classpath exception. See the file LICENSE for details.

For now write to [email protected].