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GCC/GCJ for Java to native code conversionOne of the most popular free compiler GCC is able to compile Java. And it can do compilation right to native code. To be able to create EXE file from Java under Windows we should use Windows version of this free compiler MingW/GCC. Many thanks to Mohan Embar. His GCC/GCJ bundles for MS Windows you can find on the URL: http://www.thisiscool.com/gcc_mingw.htm Recently I downloaded last bundle and installed it on my PC. What is good in this kind of Java-to-native code solution?1) It is free. GCC, which is originally came from Unix/Linux World was moved to Windows World and it still free there. 2) You can mix Java and C/C++ in a special gcc way. You can use not only JNI, the standard way how to combine C/C++ and Java, but also use gcc-specific way CNI. 3) You can use a lot of Unix/Linux C/C++ code in your applications, mixing them with Java code. 4) GCC/GCJ works with SWT Java GUI Library from IBM. SWT is pretty good user interface library and you can pre-compile it to your Java program, using GCC/GCJ compiler. What is bad with the GCC/GCJ solution?1) It comes not from the SUN and a s a result is it always behind current version of the SUN's Java. When you start to work with GCC/GCJ, very soon you will see the difference - not all the things are implemented or even if they implemented, they work different way. For example you can easy find, that there is no JDBC there. Also SWING doesn't work there. Even if it is declared that SWING is supported, in fact it doesn't work. At least I couldn't make it works (It is only my personal experience - SWING doesn't work there). 2) Size of the resulting files. When I started to use GCC/GCJ for Windows, I found the even first "Hello World" was compiled to 2Mb file. I had an idea to use GCC/GCJ for shareware programming and the size is very important factor. The less your file, the more people will download the program. When several years ago I did experiments with this compiler I was surprised. 2Mb was surprising value, because, for example, MS VC++ compile for "Hello World" produced the EXE file of 300K in size. And now I downloaded some newer versions from the Mohan's Embar web page. Now you can see the results of very simple experiment. I've just compiled "Hello World" example in several versions of GCC/GCJ. The result was even more surprising. See the tests results for several versions of GCC/GCJ:GCC/GCJ 3.4 "Hello World" EXE file size is 2.898 Mb GCC/GCJ 4.0 "Hello World" EXE file size is 8.884 Mb GCC/GCJ 4.3 "Hello World" EXE file size is 38.7 Mb Yes, we should keep in mind, that in some versions of bundles are configured to pre-compile some libs right to the EXE, some not. But even if we remember about this factor, we still see the tendency... May be in the modern World, where people use xDSL connection it is not so important which size of the file you are loading? May be... But if one resulting EXE file is about 40Mb, may be better to download and install 'normal' Java from SUN? Modern SUN's JRE is just 18-20Mb. Plus your own application. If it not too complicated, it may be not more then 1-2Mb... Contact us:
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