Compiling "static" applications with SWT/GTK

Wed Dec 3 10:42:00 GMT 2003

Andrew Haley writes:
 > Bryce McKinlay writes:
 > 
 > > My idea for static applications is to have a runtime option that
 > > dumps out a list of classes that are actually initialized/used by
 > > the application, which is then fed back into the compiler (and
 > > maybe combined with some static analysis) to generate an optimized
 > > static executable that contains only the required bits of the
 > > runtime.
 > 
 > Not a bad idea, but this seems very fragile. How would anyone know
 > for sure which classes an application needed? A few test runs
 > wouldn't do it.
Thinking about this some more, this seems like an ideal candidate for
the "gcj JIT". Whenever a class is initialized, compile its code and
leave a copy of a .o file in a directory. To build the application,
just link all the .o files together.
Andrew.