GCJ for eCos

Fri Jun 6 16:47:00 GMT 2003

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Andrew Haley [mailto:aph@redhat.com]
> ...
> An embedded Java subset need not even have garbage collection, for
> example. Reflection support can be removed, and therefore reflective
> data can be removed also. But the gc uses reflection metadata, so if
> you want garbage collection some of that information must stay. 
> ...
This is an aside, but ...
I don't think the gc relies very heavily on reflection metadata at this point.
In most cases it uses a descriptor in the vtable. It wouldn't be hard to make
it act conservatively in the few remaining cases. And I think that could easily
be done as part of a build-time option. The most recent collector versions
already support switching the collector to fully conservative mode at process
startup (by setting the GC_IGNORE_GCJ_INFO environment variable), though I don't
think that's in gcj yet, and thus needs testing.
Hans