https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=84011
--- Comment #13 from Peter Cordes <peter at cordes dot ca> --- (In reply to Jakub Jelinek from comment #10) > ?? That is the task for the linker SHF_MERGE|SHF_STRINGS handling. > Why should gcc duplicate that? Because gcc would benefit from knowing if merging makes the total block of strings for a switch() table short enough to use a uint8_t offset[] instead of uint16_t. If we don't know at compile time, we'd have to be conservative and potentially use a wider offset table. (Although as Joseph points out https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=85585#c2, without more linker support for this we could end up missing out on literal merging across compilation units. So perhaps a first step in applying this idea would be to use 32-bit offsets from the start of the .rodata.str1.1 section, so we can still let the linker merge strings and end up with them non-contiguous without having to force the one that gets kept to be the one that's part of our block of strings.)
