Announcement: micro-libgcj

Fri Jan 6 18:09:00 GMT 2006

On Fri, 6 Jan 2006, Andrew Haley wrote:
> Joel Dice writes:
> > For those who are interested, I've released a lightweight version of
> > libgcj which is useful for creating small standalone executables using
> > GCJ. For more information, please see the Sourceforge project site:
> >
> > http://ulibgcj.sourceforge.net
> >
> > Feedback is welcome.
>> This is very welcome! Back in the early days of gcj we had
> lightweight library, but we lost it as we gradually drifted towards
> full compatibility.
>> It would be nice if we could figure a way to merge the code bases.

I'd be happy to perform this merge if there's a good chance it will be 
accepted.
I'm guessing that the proper way to do this is to start with the code 
in libjava/ and add a lot of these:
#ifndef LIGHTWEIGHT_LIBGCJ
 ... // stuff that isn't wanted in the lightweight build
#endif
and a few of these:
#ifdef LIGHTWEIGHT_LIBGCJ
 ... // stuff that is dumbed-down for the lightweight build
#else
 ... // more complicated version for the heavyweight build
#endif
and just not build or link files that aren't needed by the lightweight 
version.
Would the clutter caused by these extra directives be acceptable?
A more difficult question is how would the Java sources be handled, 
considering they are not pre-processed? My choice would be to 
preprocess them, allowing the directives above, instead of maintaining 
a separate tree. This would of course be complicated by the GNU Classpath 
merge.
Finally, would it be worth delaying such a merge until gcjx is ready?
 - Joel