Hello Mike!

Tuesday February 28 1995 00:02, Mike Bilow wrote to Russell Coker:

 MB> Proper behavior for the linker is to bring in any OBJ module referenced by
 MB> name, whether used or not.  There is no such thing as an optimizing
 MB> linker.
[.....]
 MB> That is, any reference to any symbol in an OBJ module in a LIB should
 MB> cause that whole OBJ module to be brought in.


Be carefull, a linker does some optimizing. e.g far call optimizing or
deciding what compression to use (for /EXEPACK:2 ). And MS introduced
funtion level linking back in MSC 7.0. The trick is quite simple. The
compiler will, if given the /Gy switch, wrap every function in a comdat
record. This makes the whole function visible to the linker, who will not
link in functions that aren't called. So function level *is* possible in C.
It's just so, that not many compilers implement them.

 MB> If you want efficient linking, you have to separate your code into
 MB> different source files as much as possible so that these source files will
 MB> be compiled into many more and smaller OBJ files.

Yes, but the tradeoff is speed. There more granular you make a lib, the
longer the linking will take.

                                                     Philipp


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