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Re: Automaticly eliminating redundant zero initialisers
- To: Gerald Pfeifer <pfeifer at dbai dot tuwien dot ac dot at>
- Subject: Re: Automaticly eliminating redundant zero initialisers
- From: John Vickers <jvickers at dial dot pipex dot com>
- Date: Mon, 01 May 2000 15:02:05 +0100
- Cc: Tigran Aivazian <tigran at veritas dot com>,Graham Stoney <greyham at research dot canon dot com dot au>, gcc at gcc dot gnu dot org
- References: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0005011346310.76137-100000@deneb.dbai.tuwien.ac.at>
- Reply-To: jvickers at dial dot pipex dot com
Gerald Pfeifer wrote:
>
> On Mon, 1 May 2000, Tigran Aivazian wrote:
> > oops, I just realised you are asking for something slightly different.
> > What I meant is that you can now safely ignore zero-initializers because
> > BSS is zero-cleared by the kernel explicitly.
>
> *The* kernel does not exist. Not all of the world is Linux.
As has been said elsewhere, it's nothing to do with Linux,
it's about language definitions - although the Linux folks
sometimes seem to get a bit bothered when the language
doesn't do what they know it should...
My 2d is that some strange hackers like to edit binary files
(ROM images etc) to change parameter values, and this is hard to
do if the variables in question live in the bss. So if this
optimisation happens, can we have a way of turning it off ?
I think this has come up before, and some of the strange hackers
in question are regular contributors to egcs^H^H^H^Hgcc.
John.