Re: statically linking with gij.o

[Bryce McKinlay <mckinlay at redhat dot com>]

Per Bothner wrote:

> It seems like it would be useful to link gij.o with a bunch of 
> application classes into an executable.  One reason is to switch 
> dynamically different "main" classes, but even more valuable might be 
> to set properties and VM flags, and in general use the options that 
> gij gives us.


An alternative approach to property and runtime argument setting might 
be to add support for a GCJ_ARGS environment variable. So perhaps you 
could do something like:

GCJ_ARGS='--main=my.foo.Main' ./myapp

> With dynamic linking you just run gij and put the appropriate .so 
> files in the appropriate environment variables (LD_LIBRARY_PATH and 
> CLASSPATH, though I'm a little unsure of the specifics).
>
> For static linking it's a little harder.  We could do:
>   gcj -o foo gij.o foo.o bar.java baz.jar ...
> However, gij.o does not get installed, and it's not clear how to do so 
> cleanly.  A simple solution is to add it to libgcj.a - and maybe 
> libgcj.so?  In that case it would become the "default" main if --main 
> isn't specified.  I don't know if that's a good idea or not.


I think eventually we'd like to make the compiler smart enough to find 
the main() if one isn't specified. So it might be unwise to put in a 
different meaning for this action.

Regards

Bryce