Hacker News Reader

The VM + minimal stdlib is not exactly small. Also AFAICT it works the same on every major platform, that is, it's a fat binary. Not bad.

View on HN

Plus, you can strip down the Java bytecode even further using ProGuard, but convincing it to not delete code that's actually used is an error-prone dark art.

I've been hoping that a community project would come about to break java.base into smaller modules. Even if there are cross/circular dependencies, I wouldn't mind if many methods were stubbed out or just removed if I promised not to use them.

> Not bad.

Unless you consider that basic support services are what the Java runtime should be providing on its own. Fundamentally, a command line Hello world should only take a few dozen bytes of bytecode.

Doesn't this bundle the VM/GC/etc. besides the bytecode?

Yes, it does.

The 11MB is (most likely) 11MB of the Java runtime (compared to 200MB for the full runtime which includes all the classes required by the standard library) + a few dozen bytes of bytecode.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com