[PATCH] RFC: garbage collect unused code/data?

Denis Vlasenko vda at ilport.com.ua
Fri Apr 7 07:28:01 UTC 2006


On Thursday 06 April 2006 19:00, Rich Felker wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 06, 2006 at 05:28:59PM +0300, Denis Vlasenko wrote:
> > On Wednesday 05 April 2006 19:30, David Daney wrote:
> > > Note that in the case of mips, the linker has had the --gc-sections 
> > > option for quite some time now, but has only had working support since 
> > > about 'GNU ld version 2.16.91 20050817'.  The first official binutils 
> > > release that will work with --gc-sections is 2.17.
> > > 
> > > Probably the best way to handle it would be through some sort of 
> > > configure option (perhaps in conjunction with the linker test).  That 
> > > way it could be turned off if someone was using a broken tool chain.
> > 
> > Why do you want it configurable? Dropping a few unused code fragments
> > can never hurt...
> > 
> > I think that with checks for "known good" gcc and ld versions
> > (arch-dependent) it could be enabled unconditionally.
> 
> It should be configurable so the ELF users can disable it and see what
> bloat they still need to fix.

Why do you want to fix it manually when toolchain is able
to do it automatically for you? I am not a big fan of splitting
few .c files into zillion of one-function-per-file .c files
(or preprocessor magic which does the same with #ifdefs),
are you?

OTOH I understand that non-ELF targets may still need to do
those tricks... oh well.
--
vda



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