RFR: 8338768: Introduce runtime lookup to check for static builds [v2]

[Erik Joelsson]

On Mon, 26 Aug 2024 02:07:39 GMT, David Holmes <dholmes at openjdk.org> wrote:

> I understand the cost overhead experienced by any individual Java run may be lost in the noise, but it still impacts every single Java run just to save some time/resources for the handful of builders of statically linked VMs. I am not a fan.

I understand your stance and it's a fair principle. My opinion is that we need to weigh the pros and cons with more nuance. We are often in situations where have to weigh runtime performance against things like (openjdk) developer convenience, maintainability and build performance. As we are building the Java platform, we often give up a lot to eek out the last drops of runtime performance, but we sure aren't always making that tradeoff in favor of performance. As a very clear example, we could enable LTO (Link Time Optimization), which would likely give a measurable (though likely small) performance improvement at runtime, at the cost of a big increase in build time, but we haven't, because we don't think the tradeoff is worth it. My take on the current issue is that the potential savings in build time is easily comparable to using LTO or not, while the difference in runtime performance is likely different by orders of magnitudes. My point is that we make these kinds of calls quite 
 often.

So in this case, my take is that even if the size difference in the number of people impacted is big, I think the size difference in the actual impact more than makes up for it.

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PR Comment: https://git.openjdk.org/jdk/pull/20666#issuecomment-2315348318