Re: [MAD SCIENCE EXPERIMENT]: Replace some libtool functionality with handcoded C

[Andrew Haley <aph at redhat dot com>]

Mohan Embar writes:
 > 
 > >Well its a nice experiment, but probably a more compicated solution 
 > >than we need. My preferred approach is just to rip out libtool 
 > >entirely. This will mean slightly more platform-specific configuration 
 > >is required, but overall, things should be simpler.
 > 
 > >What I'd like is to write a new makefile, using the latest 
 > >autoconf/automake, which: a) doesn't use libtool, and b) incrementally 
 > >links each java package with ld -r. The ld -r approach means that the 
 > >final link consists of linking a small number of large .o files instead 
 > >of a large number of small ones, which should be a lot faster. This 
 > >approach also stops it from tripping over command-line length limits, 
 > >and could perhaps later be extended to do something like 
 > >--enable-libgcj-multifile but for .o files.

An interesting alternative is to compile many .java files together,
getting the benefit of interprocedural optimization.  I know this will
be prohibitively expensive on many machines, but I'd like to try on
the high-end boxes.

I know that we don't have much interprocedural optimization at present,
but I hope that will change.

Andrew.