overhead of reflection info

Fri Feb 20 03:50:00 GMT 2004

For future reference, I commented out make_class_data() in class.c,
which (if I understand correctly) will inhibit the output of
reflection data. My compressed binary size (using the UPX executable
compressor on Linux/i86) plummeted from 728kb to 490kb. Roughly 33%
smaller. Also, 120kb of that (post-compression) is DWARF2 info,
meaning that 370kb should be "possible" with an unwinder specialized
to Java that trades away runtime performance for smaller executables.
I think I'm going to see how far I can get with a patch that disables
reflection. Getting libgcj to live without it will be a challenge,
but I think it can be done.
 - a