Compiling "static" applications with SWT/GTK

Mon Dec 1 10:21:00 GMT 2003

Ranjit Mathew writes:
 > Per Wrote:
 > >What is the difference between:
 > >(1) installation script installs a statically linked application; vs
 > >(2) installation script installs a dynamically linked application
 > >plus a shared library in an application-specific directory.
 > >
 > >I have a hard time seeing the usability difference.
 > 
 > Download size for one - a statically linked in executable
 > is unlikely to be as big as the whole libgcj.so, especially
 > as more and more APIs keep getting implemented in
 > libgcj.
That's not really true, because of Java's Class.forName. You have to
include all of libgcj, because the linker can't tell what might be
needed.
As I have said here many times, the right thing to do is create a
configure tool that splits libgcj into a number of components and
allow the user to choose which ones they want. But it's quite hard to
solve the web of dependencies.
Andrew.