RFC: micro-libgcj merge proposal

[Per Bothner]

Dalibor Topic wrote:
> Ah, I see, I was under the impression that the idea behind micro-libgcj 
> was stripping out the unnecssary bits of the class libraries to a 
> minimal core, rather then additionally providing alternative 
> implementations that take advantage of the capabilities of the devices. 

In general you might want to have a simplified implementation (e.g.
reading/printing floating-point numbers less accurately or in hex
format).  Some code might use regexps if they are available, but
if they're not work around them being missing. One might want to
simplify the class hierarchy, perhaps by leaving out abstract classes
or interfaces.  One might want to simplify character and string
handling to only support UTF-8 or Latin-1 encodings.

So there can be lots of places where one might want to change
code rather than just remove it.  Doing this at the bytecode
level is hard; doing it with conditional compilation much easier.
-- 
	--Per Bothner
per@bothner.com   http://per.bothner.com/