GCC 4.5.1 and later use a naming convention where functions are not
prefixed with an underscore, whereas previous versions added the
underscore. This change was made to ensure compatibility with
Microsoft's compiler. Since GCC 4.5.0 has a serious code generation
bug, we now only support later versions, so it makes sense to assume
the newer convention.
This allows OpenJDK to access time zone data which is normally found
under java.home, but which we must embed in the executable itself to
create a self-contained build. The VM intercepts various file
operations, looking for paths which start with a prefix specified by
the avian.embed.prefix property and redirecting those operations to an
embedded JAR.
For example, if avian.embed.prefix is "/avian-embedded", and code
calls File.exists() with a path of
"/avian-embedded/javahomeJar/foo.txt", the VM looks for a function
named javahomeJar via dlsym, calls the function to find the memory
region containing the embeded JAR, and finally consults the JAR to see
if the file "foo.txt" exists.
The trick is to make all destructors non-virtual. This is safe because
we never use the delete operator, which is the only case where virtual
destructors are relevant. This is a better solution than implementing
our own delete operator, because we want libraries loaded at runtime to
use the libstdc++ version, not ours.