Matt Thomas writes: > Joe Buck wrote: > > I think you need to talk to the binutils people. It should be possible > > to make ar and ld more memory-efficient. > > Even though systems maybe demand paged, having super large > libraries that consume lots of address space can be a problem. > > I'd like to libjava be split into multiple shared libraries. In C, > we have libc, libm, libpthread, etc. In X11, there's X11, Xt, etc. > So why does java have everything in one shared library? Could the > swing stuff be moved to its own? Are there other logical > divisions?
It might be nice, certainly. However, there are some surprising dependencies between parts of the Java library, and these would cause separate shared libraries to depend on each other, negating most of the advantage of separation. We are in the process of rewriting the Java ABI so that sumbol resolution in libraries is done lazily rather than eagerly. This will help. Even so, I would prefer to divide libjava -- if it is to be divided -- on a logical basis rather than simply in order to make libraries smaller. Andrew.
