Is there any reason keeping track of symbols couldn't/shouldn't be
added to ld as an option? Any idea how difficult that would be?
-Ed
On Aug 16, 2006, at 11:00 AM, Bruce Stephens wrote:
Tuomo Valkonen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
[...]
More likely this manual ordering is remnant from the times when
computers barely had enough memory to run the compiler, let alone to
retain in memory the symbols of already processed archives.
I've worked with projects where the final link took a really
significant amount of time and memory---much more than compiling most
of the source code. However, I'm sure you're right. I doubt there's
any technical reason for linkers being as they are.
It's probably just that there's not that much incentive to change.
If you're working on something which is going to be linked by more
than just one linker, then you don't get much advantage if only one of
those behaves sanely. The linking rules will tend to stick at
whatever the lowest-common-denominator linker supports.
The exception would be if the annoyance was very great (when you might
be able to persuade everyone to change linkers), but just listing the
same static libraries more than once probably isn't annoying enough.
So my guess is we're stuck with this for eternity, however silly it
is in technical terms.
[...]
