FAQ update

Wed Nov 3 23:37:00 GMT 1999

Jeff Sturm wrote:
> Try static linking. The interaction with boehm-gc seems to incur extra
> overhead when shared libraries are used (see Anthony Green's message from
> last week on this topic). On one program that makes heavy use of the
> allocator I achieved over 30% runtime performance gain with static
> linking.

I wonder - is this overhead due to calls between application code and the
shared library, or between the libgcj and libgcjgc libraries? If it (or part
of it) is the latter, is there any reason why the two libraries shouln't be
merged?
Although it is nice in theory to have everything modular and the GC
implementation swappable at runtime, in reality this isn't going to work -
libgcj.so depends on private implementation details of the collector (as
anyone who has tried to change the GC configuration without recompiling
libgcj as well will know).
One less library would mean a smaller/simpler install, and (hopefully) less
run-time linking overhead.
regards
 [ bryce ]