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Re: Compiling "static" applications with SWT/GTK
On Dec 1, 2003, at 5:44 PM, Steve D. Perkins wrote:
Dear God I hope not! That would be beyond silly. It's quite
probable that libgcj will become pervasive on major Linux
distributions, but a "libgcj.dll" will NEVER be pervasive on the Win32
platform. This would be GUARANTEEING the need for a DLL installation,
creating needless deployment complications. I'm really not looking
forward to having to build by own custom GCJ from source just to get
work done.
I don't see how libgcj.dll will complicate deployment that much.
Windows application development environments (Delphi, VB, Visual C++)
have required deployment of runtime DLLs for many years, and developers
have managed just fine. How would libgcj.dll be any different?
Obviously we need to address the binary compatibility issues, but in
general, the advantages of using a DLL far outweigh the disadvantages.
That isn't to say that I don't think we should support static
compilation, but due to the nature of Java, its difficult to support
dynamic language features in a way that is both simple (for the
application developer) and robust.
Regards
Bryce.