Re: [RFC PATCH] Enabling ld -r ELF .stab/.stabstr optimization

[Ian Lance Taylor <ian at airs dot com>]

Earl Chew <earl_chew@agilent.com> writes:

> Ian Lance Taylor wrote:
> > Having -r optimize stabs sections will work poorly if the resulting
> > object is indeed linked with other objects, as opportunities for
> > optimizing stabs in the resulting executable between different -r
> > objects will be lost.  This will hurt a certain style of building
> > large programs, in which each directory contributes a single .o file
> > built using -r.
> 
> Would you give an example illustrating this? My understanding
> is that the .stabs string optimisation basically removes duplicates,
> and I cannot see how that would hurt further downstream optimisation.

There is duplicate string removal, yes, but there is also header file
consolidation.

Actually, though, maybe I'm wrong.  All the individual stabs sections
will be merged into a single stab section, but header file
consolidation may still work as before.

So I guess my only real concern would be that the consolidated stabs
section be correct for another link, which is probably is.

Ian