Re: [Patch, Java]: Add --enable-reduced-reflection configure option.

[David Daney <ddaney at avtrex dot com>]

Andrew Haley wrote:
> David Daney wrote:
> > This patch adds a new configure option to easily allow libgcj to be
> > built with the -freduced-reflection option.  This reduces the size (as
> > reported by the size command) of libgcj by about 5% on i686-pc-linux.
> > Although the resulting library has reduced functionality (as
> > serialization, RMI and CORBA don't work with -freduced-reflection), the
> > size savings can be important in some circumstances (embedded devices).
> >
> >
> > The name of the option is --enable-reduced-reflection, although I
> > considered and rejected --with-reduced-reflection.
> >
> >
> > Tested on i686-pc-linux.  Where as expected most -findirect-dispatch
> > execution tests failed as well as the interpreter tests and several
> > other random tests that rely on accurate reflection meta-data.
> >
> >
> > OK to commit?
>
> OK.  I'm a little nervous about this, but I can see the advantages.
> I wonder if it might be worth dropping the nonfunctional packages
> from libgcj built with reduce reflection.

I have thought about this.  And while it may be relatively easy to 
remove RMI and CORBA, there would still be broken serialization which 
would be quite difficult to remove.

I will defer a couple more days while we think about this.

Do we really want this in libgcj?  I don't know, I could keep it as a 
local patch without much pain.

David Daney