ARM support

Sat Jun 28 22:32:00 GMT 2003

On 28 Jun 2003, Geert Bevin wrote:
> Is it possible to tune down the space requirements of GCJ? Currently a
> stripped version of libgcj.so.3.0.0 takes about 8MB. That might be a bit
> big for small embedded devices.

This comes up quite often. Sadly, the Java runtime is bloated and heavily
interdependent. A simple "Hello, World" program tends to load/initialize
hundreds of classes whether you use Sun's JRE or gcj.
Probably the best solution for embedded applications would be J2ME
support in libgcj, whatever that entails. I'm not aware of anyone working
on it.
Right now you can use static linking, though it doesn't always work
correctly (it will omit classes loaded by reflection). The current lower
bound on executable size seems to be around 1MB when linked with -static.
Jeff