------- Comment #3 from mtrudel at gmx dot ch 2007-07-04 06:59 ------- This is an old discussion and comes up in the mailinglist regularly. The most promising approach is to explicitly exclude parts of the class library. JNC (http://jnc.mtsystems.ch/) supports excluding the GUI stuff (AWT/Swing) and JCE what already leads to a great size reduction (since these will be pulled into every binary).
BTW, here the FAQ entry for your question from the JNC website: Why are the binaries so big? As JNC evolves, it supports more and more classes of the Java API. The problem now is, that the Java API classes are heavily interconnected; a simple "Hello World" application uses the security manager which uses AWT which uses... Because of this, you will always have a big part of the classlibrary in your binaries. For Java, this is not a problem. Endusers require to have the JVM, thus having all classes anyway. For native compilation, this is a bigger problem because it's not just a bug that can be fixed. The design of Java doesn't fit into the concept of native compilation (concerning the size of binaries). Since JNC 0.9, you can exclude parts of the class library if you don't need them and thus drastically reduce the size of your binaries. -- http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=32619
