gcj executable size reduction?

Wed May 5 00:59:00 GMT 2004

Per Bothner <per@bothner.com> writes:
>> The way it works is this: you compile all your code into bytecode, it
>> traces reachability (including symbol tables in any CNI code) and
>> stubs out unreachable method with a one-line "throw new
>> UnsatisfiedLinkError()". There are a few more optimizations, but
>> that's the main gist.

> I'll look at this more closely. Does this also optimize libgcj?

Yes; that's where most of the gain comes from. It starts from
libgcj-3.3.jar.
>> The other change I made was to add -finhibit-reflection, which drops
>> as much reflection metadata as possible. Class.forName() still works
>> and I keep enough method info to use interface dispatch (although I'd
>> love to do that differently).

> Do you have a patch for this? Is this something that would/should be
> added to the source tree?

http://core.ibex.org/upstream/gcc-3.3/patches/zzz-inhibit.reflection.patch
I need to catch up with the gcc dev at some point, but if people are
cool with the general idea, I'll take the time to integrate it.
> I've added a -verbose:class to print out initializations,

Ah, that's nice. We could definately feed that back into NanoGoat.
> plus a -lgij to enable compiling a static executable.

Hrm, I don't understand what this does. I just leave the interpreter
out altogether.
 - a