GCC 4.1: Buildable on GHz machines only?

[Richard Earnshaw]

On Sat, 2005-05-07 at 13:58, Andi Kleen wrote:
> Tom Tromey <tromey@redhat.com> writes:
> >
> > Splitting up libgcj.so probably makes sense even for the Linux distro
> > case (the one I am most concerned with at the moment), just so that
> > apps that don't use AWT or Swing don't really pay for it.  The
> 
> Hmm? Unless you initialize AWT/swing in all programs that code
> should never be paged in for non GUI programs. Ok in theory
> if you use a random build order then a lot of pages could
> contain GUI and non GUI code together, but that is probably
> unlikely.
> 
> The only reason to split it out would be to allow a libgcj
> installation that is not dependent on the X11 libraries on the
> RPM/dpkg/etc. level for small setups, but I am not sure how useful
> that is anymore for most distributions.
> 
> And perhaps to make the linking steps in the gcc build a bit
> faster, but just for that it seems like a lot of work.

Don't forget that the dynamic linker still has to do some relocation at
load time.  Not all platforms support pre-linking to mitigate this, and
even those that do don't necessarily have it done on all shared
libraries.

The size of libgcj is such that it has non-trivial amounts of start up
linking to do.  If you then add in redundant X libraries that it pulls
in for apps that don't need the graphics the overall effect can be
significant.

R.