@mikehearn Are you using avian for your binaries?

@mikehearn I will review that chapter 🙂

no ... i have two projects. one is corda, my day job. we use javafx/tornadofx/kotlin for that for everything. there are two gui apps of note. one is called the Corda Explorer. the other, that i'm working on now, is called the DemoBench.

my other project is provisionally called gumball. it's the one that makes standalone optimised binaries with Avian.

actually i uploaded the code to github the other day but i'm not announcing it yet because it needs more work and a less crappy name

so right now that repo is more like a backup

Aha 🙂 gumball. Fantastic :))

basically it can't gumball itself yet because ProGuard deletes stuff that it needs :-0

Ouch.. and you use ProGuard to reduce the binary size?

making a proguard config that works with non-trivial java apps is always a pain

yeah so you can get a kotlin-style hello world app down to a few megabytes

that includes everything: the parts of the java stdlib needed, the JITC, the generational GC

That's the dream.

If you can make this.. oh man.

well it's made already, for "hello world". you can even try it today. there are a few more pieces of work required before a 1.0 is ready:

1) it needs to gumball itself so i can distribute the tool as a standalone binary too. that's just a case of ploughing through the proguard-generated errors to ensure it keeps all the code used via reflection/JNI.

2) it needs to be able to gumball some other java apps successfully. i haven't picked what to try it with yet.

3) it needs to support linux/windows too. right now it's MacOS only. but that's not for any fundamental reason.

I love that idea.. So the users won't have to build/install avian at all?

i just need to teach it how to invoke the linker on each platform properly.

yeah, exactly, you get a standalone native binary with no dependencies.

It would be pretty cool to set up a build server cluster so you can use an api to create the binaries.

4) i'd like to add an option to link in SWT. Avian has a demo that can do this, it uses SWT to do native UI on each platform with a fully standalone binary, it's quite impressive.

so the bulk of the work is done already. JavaFX is harder and of course, you won't be getting a few-megabytes binary out of that. but for small/simple utilities like this is intended for SWT is OK.

yeah I'd like to support cross-compilation too. It's not hard. Actually I might do Mac->Linux first.

Cross-compilation might come in a v2 though.

Yeah, for installers, boot strappers etc this is perfect. A native UI wrapper that can download the rest etc.

right

Avian is an acceptable JVM but it's of course no HotSpot. For Serious Apps™ you would still want to use HotSpot.

As long as it's good enough to create a fancy bootstrapper that can manage JVMs it's more than good enough.