Re: optimizing for size

[Mark Smith <mark@camazotz.com>]

> Of course, the success of this approach will depend
> on whether you measure size just in terms of your application classes 
> or
> in terms of the whole body of bytecode needed to execute the program.
> Certainly your application classes will be smaller if they can refer to
> system classes by names like a/b/c/ instead of java/lang/String.

I've been thinking about a relatively simple technique to achieve this: 
generating static forwarding methods.  If I have N classes that call a 
system class method, the system class and method name is repeated N 
times in the constant pools, and obfuscators can't touch the strings.  
Those calls could be replaced by an application-defined static method 
that calls the system class method, and the obfuscator will then 
compress that class/method name in the N original class files.  I'm not 
sure where the break-even point is in terms of overall space yet.

Thanks for all the suggestions; in particular, "--via-shimple" doubled 
the space saved (3.5k on a 60k jar file vs 1.7k without).