Interesting paper on Supporting Binary Compatibility with Static Compilation

Sun Aug 18 08:49:00 GMT 2002

Jeff Sturm wrote:
> Suppose the compiled class metadata were free of pointers instead. No
> relocations, except lazy function calls. The metadata could then be
> constant and loaded into .rodata.

I think this could be a big win. We could also at the same time try to
make the metadata more compact: If we use integer offsets instead of
pointers in most cases 16 bits is plenty.
I've attached some notes I made, concentrating on representing fields.
Similar ideas apply to methods, but their representation is more
complex, so I started with fields.
-- 
	--Per Bothner
per@bothner.com http://www.bothner.com/per/
-------------- next part --------------
An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed...
Name: reflect.cc
URL: <http://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/java/attachments/20020818/5baa0e56/attachment.cc>