Compiling "static" applications with SWT/GTK

Thu Dec 4 11:25:00 GMT 2003

Bryce McKinlay writes:
 > On Dec 4, 2003, at 7:44 AM, Andrew Haley wrote:
 > 
 > >> Andrew wrote:
 > >>> 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.
 > >>
 > >> It depends on the application. Many embedded systems, for
 > >> example, have a limited and well-defined feature set, so you
 > >> don't need very many runs to exercise everything.
 > >
 > > Sure, and it's not a bad solution for some specialized application
 > > areas. However, it's not any kind of a general solution to the
 > > problem -- all you need to make it fail is to open a menu that hadn't
 > > been opened during testing, and boom. This is not an argument against
 > > having such a facility in libgcj, but it's not sufficient.
 > 
 > Yeah. It would still require human interaction to some degree. I 
 > envisage something like a build profile optimizer in eclipse that tells 
 > you which classes are statically reachable, and which were actually 
 > used by a test run of your program. By default it would include 
 > everything reachable, as well as perhaps a set of rules like "if 
 > java.util.Date is used, include all the locales for Calendar/Date". But 
 > the developer could go through and uncheck packages and classes in 
 > order to create a space-optimized build.
Cool. Lotsa work, though.
Andrew.