Am 14.07.2019 um 04:08 schrieb J. Gareth Moreton:
Just a thought that I'd chuck in on this... I did wonder how practical
it would be to store checksums of all compiled procedures and the like
and to look for collisions. When studying how the compiler is built,
I noticed a lot of the internal methods, due to conditional defines,
would compile into identical code, so merging them would reduce the
binary size if the linker is able to strip out procedures that are
never called. Granted, I haven't done research on how Free Pascal
does Whole Program Optimisation yet, especially as it requiring a
separate compilation pass has always put me off. I would have thought
that the linker should be able to handle it right there and then
because it has all the information it needs.
That would be a possible approach to use if the output format does not
support combining equal sections. PE/COFF's COMDAT sections do have a
flag that says that they need to have equal content (there are also
other possibilities). Don't know right now whether ELF does.
Regards,
Sven
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