Re: GCJ information

[Tom Tromey <tromey at redhat dot com>]

>>>>> "Adam" == Adam Megacz <gcj@lists.megacz.com> writes:

Adam> After the new year I'm going to hack up some tools to help trim
Adam> down the size of all-static gcj binaries. The aforementioned
Adam> simple "dump list of loaded classes and feed back into linker"
Adam> will probably be my first attempt.

If you're concerned about size, I think there are two really
worthwhile things to do that nobody has tried yet:

1. Change the representation of metadata.  For instance, it could be
stored compressed and then decompressed during class initialization.
Done properly this could also reduce startup time when libgcj is
dynamic, by reducing the number of relocs required.  There have been a
few discussions of this and related ideas on this list.

2. Implement "section GC" for gcj.  With this feature you can tell the
linker to omit all unused functions, including unused virtual methods.
g++ can already do this.  I don't know how well this is documented,
but in theory one could do it by reading the appropriate code in the
C++ front end.

Tom