Re: Jessie security providers can't be precompiled

[Andrew Haley <aph at redhat dot com>]

Bryce McKinlay writes:
 > Andrew Haley wrote:
 > 
 > >or rather, if they are precompiled we still load the bytecode anyway.
 > >This is because VMCompiler depends on the security providers, so any
 > >that are loaded before VMCompiler is initialized are interpreted.  The
 > >cure is to bypass the security provider machinery.

 > Would it make sense to include a small C implementation of MD5 to
 > be used by VMCompiler? Initializing the providers was bringing a
 > LOT of code into the application startup/runtime bootstrap code
 > path. I suppose this fixes it too, since we're only calling MD5
 > directly, but a native implementation may still be smaller/faster?

It would make sense to include a small C implementation of MD5, yes.
However:

1.  The current implementation could be made much twice as fast simply
    by making some methods private/final and using -O3.  The only
    reason I didn't do that already is I don't know how to hack the
    automake machinery to have different compiler options for one
    file.

2.  MD5 doesn't come very high in real-world profiling of
    applications.

It's still worth doing, though.

Andrew.