Re: [JAVA,libtool] Big libjava is biiiig.

[Andrew Haley <aph at redhat dot com>]

Dave Korn wrote:

> 1)  Would this be a reasonable approach, specifically i) in adding a configure
> option to cause sublibraries to be built, and ii) in using gmake's $(filter)
> construct to crudely subdivide the libraries like this?

At program startup the first library would be loaded, it would load
the next, and so on.  There are a few parts of libgcj that are truly
independent, but I suspect that you'd always load almost all of it.
So, you'd have longer startup time for loading all those files.


With regard to GNU libc platforms:

You'd no longer be able to make so much use of fast calls between
functions in the same library; you'd have to go via the PLT.

Also, dl_iterate_phdr() is used a great deal (for finding exception
regions, garbage collection, etc.) and it linearly scans the libraries
that are loaded.  So, the more libraries you have loaded, the slower
it goes.

Now, I don't know how much of these characteristics are shared by
Windows, but I imagine some of them are.

So, I suspect your best bet would be to split libgcj into core and
non-core libraries and not slice much more thinly than that.  I can
advise you what is core and what isn't.

Andrew.