Re: Minimal libjava for embedded applications?

[Tom Tromey <tromey at redhat dot com>]

>>>>> "Joshua" == Joshua Shagam (NY) <jshagam@guillemot.com> writes:

Joshua> I was wondering if there has already been any work into making
Joshua> a minimal libjava for use with gcj which only provides the
Joshua> bare minimum necessary to get a basic application running.

Nothing formal, though it has been talked about a lot.
I know some other users omit various parts of the library from the
build, for instance modifying the makefiles to omit all the AWT,
Swing, etc, code.

Joshua> Is there already a minimal libjava for embedded applications,
Joshua> and if not, how difficult would it be to write one or adapt
Joshua> the existing libjava for this purpose?

There are big pieces that you can omit solely by modifying the
Makefile.  Whether enough of it can be done this way, I don't know (I
tend to doubt it).

Beyond that, I suppose you can delete methods you don't need, or
bodies of methods, to further reduce the link size -- if you don't
mind a one-off solution.  gcj should be fairly robust about library
changes like this, though some changes to Class or Object will
probably cause problems.

Note that static linking with gcj requires special care.  Some things
used during libgcj startup are only found via reflection, you will
have to know what they are and arrange for them to be linked in.

Finally, you could look through the gcj list archives.  This topic has
come up a lot, along with brainstormed solutions and things like that.

Tom