Why interpret dynamically loaded classes?

Thu Aug 24 08:52:00 GMT 2000

Matt Welsh writes:
 > 
 > Jack Andrews <jack.andrews@str.com.au> writes:
 > > > But why not just compile the dynamically loaded class to a
 > > > > > native shared object at *runtime*, then link at runtime, too?
 > > > > 
 > > > Perhaps, but I really like this idea. I've been thinking of doing
 > > > this for a while but I've never found the spare time to try it. I
 > > > don't think it would be very difficult.
 > 
 > I spent a significant amount of time working on this a few months ago,
 > and ran into some pretty serious limitations in gcc/gcj which prevented
 > me from making much progress. These things could probably be fixed but I
 > didn't want to put that much effort into it.
 > 
 > The core issue was that at the time I was working on this (in April), 
 > newer versions of GCJ and GIJ were very buggy, and would not properly
 > load precompiled .so files.
Well, that stuff has been fixed for a while, and hopefully once we get
an integrated source tree this pain should be a thing of the past.
 > One issue to look out for is that you need to be concerned about class
 > dependencies. Let's say that you have a class, A, which you wish
 > to load. First you want to compile A.class into a .so. However you also 
 > need to be concerned about any classes which A.class depends on -- since 
 > you need to prelink them against A.so. So if A.class depends on B.class 
 > and C.class, you need to be sure to prelink A.so with B.so and C.so, 
 > which might also need to be compiled. So you have to do a recursive
 > dependency check (and recursive class compilation) in order for this to
 > work.
Indeed, but gcj has to do this already to load all the dependent
classes, and the ClassLoader has to do it too; it's already a done
deal AFAICS.
Andrew.