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Re: Compiling "static" applications with SWT/GTK
- From: Andrew Haley <aph at redhat dot com>
- To: "Ranjit Mathew" <rmathew at hotmail dot com>
- Cc: per at bothner dot com, java at gcc dot gnu dot org
- Date: Mon, 1 Dec 2003 10:28:27 +0000
- Subject: Re: Compiling "static" applications with SWT/GTK
- References: <BAY1-F6b75UFlewu9tc0001fa00@hotmail.com>
For what it's worth, in our experience the big killer with static
executables is security bug fixes.
When Linux secrity teams find a security hole in a shared library they
issue a patch against that library. There was a nasty problem about a
year ago when a security hole was discovered in a library that was
statically linked into a bunch of applications. It took a good while
to find and rebuild and distribute all those applications. This alone
was quite enough to persuade people that static linking is a Bad
Thing.
At present we don't have binary compatibility between libgcj releases,
so this doesn't apply to us: we can't use the system libgcj anyway.
But once BC is done, we will get release-to-release compatibility.
Andrew.