Compiling "static" applications with SWT/GTK

[Andrew Haley]

Anthony Green writes:
 > On Mon, 2003-12-01 at 15:10, Andrew Haley wrote:
 > >  > I mean, my GCJ installation in my Linux environment ships with a
 > >  > libgcj static library and a libgcj shared library, and GCJ has a
 > >  > "-static" flag... so what's the problem?  If there are problems
 > >  > with the "-static" flag, or static compilation in general, it would
 > >  > seem to make more sense to resolve those issues...  rather than
 > >  > leave it broken and tell people "it's like that on purpose", or
 > >  > "it's for your own good".
 > > 
 > > It can't be done.  I have explained why it can't be done on several
 > > occasions.
 > 
 > Well, what I remember you saying is that it can't be done in a way that
 > fully supports the language features (Class.forName()).

Well, yes.  A number of Java APIs require dynamic class lookup.

 > But there's ample evidence that people are interested in, and are
 > capable of building useful statically linked applications that
 > don't require full language runtime support (XWT is a great example
 > of this).

Sure, no argument there.  I have no objection at all to supporting a
well-defined static Java subset.  It would be useful.  But it requires
some configuration work.

Andrew.