Binary size of statically linked java application

[Andrew Haley]

Marco Trudel writes:
 > Mohan Embar wrote:
 > > Hi All,
 > > 
 > >> I usually remove AWT/Swing (the whole GUI stuff) and the whole 
 > >> javax.crypto stuff. Then a real application is about 4.5mb (stripped of 
 > >> course).
 > > 
 > > I'm not clear on why this would work given that the linker is supposed
 > > to strip out unused code.
 > 
 > Well, I'm not talking about objects that won't be pulled into the final 
 > binary (as you said, that wouldn't make sense). I'm talking about the 
 > ones that will but are actually not really needed... From my FAQ:
 > 
 > Why are the binaries so big? With GCJ X.Y.Z, they were way smaller...
 > As GCJ evolves, it supports more and more classes of the Java API. The 
 > problem now is, that the Java API classes are heavily interconnected; a 
 > simple "Hello World" application uses the security manager which uses 
 > AWT which uses... Because of this, you will always have a big part of 
 > the GCJ library in your binaries.
 > For Java, this is not a problem. Endusers require to have the JVM, thus 
 > having all classes anyway. For GCJ, this is a bigger problem because 
 > it's not just a bug that can be fixed. The design of Java doesn't fit 
 > into the concept of native compilation (concerning the size of binaries).

Eh?  Sure it does.  With the classical Java virtual machine you have a
bunch of libraries in .jar files, and with gcj you have a bunch of
libraries in DSOs.  Same thing, more or less: the DSOs are
precompiled, the .jar files aren't.

Andrew.