Re: stripping libgcj.so.4 -- lightweighting libjava

[Andrew Haley <aph at redhat dot com>]

Erik Poupaert writes:
 >
 > > There's actually a lot of redundancy in the debug info - much of
 > > the same information is duplicated between the debug info and
 > > gcj's class reflection data. One day, it might be nice to teach
 > > GDB about the reflection data as we could reduce the binary size
 > > a lot while preserving debug-ability.
 > 
 > At this point in time, GDB-debugability doesn't necessarily seem to
 > be a widely shared concern (quite a few people resort to the one or
 > the other form of logging anyway).

This is quite insane.  Debugging is crucial.

 > I've had a close look at libjava/configure.in. The first thing that
 > struck me is the fact that it would harm few people to remove quite
 > a few dependencies. These dependencies could still be linked
 > seperately, outside libgcj, for the ones who need it, while
 > offering an attractive, lightweight implementation to the vast
 > majority of current and prospective users.

I've thought many times about designing a mechanism that will allow
easy building of subsets for differebnt kinds of user.  The new ABI
will make this sort of thing much easier.

Andrew.