Supporting different runtime profiles

Sat Jun 30 21:37:00 GMT 2001

I just sent a .java preprocessing patch to java-patches for comment.
The point of the patch is to help support alternate runtime profiles.
The profile descriptions would live in libjava/profiles (like
libjava/profiles/midp). The profile configurations would consist of
(at least) a set of exclusions and inclusions from the default gcj
class library, as well as -D options to pass to the preprocessors.
I think our profiles will be something of a mix of Sun's J2ME
`profiles' and `configurations'. I'm curious if anyone else has
thought about this in the context of gcj.
In any case, I was thinking you would just enable different profiles
to be built along with the standard libgcj at configure time with
something like --enable-profiles=midp,some-other-profile,etc., and the
build system would build all of the requested libraries. Each profile
would have a corresponding spec file (or equivalent) to link in the
different library and provide different options to the compiler (to
disable floating point or reflection for instance). The gcj front end
will need some option for selecting the profile.
Does this sound good? bad?
Thanks,
AG