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Re: The bloat sweepstakes...
On 10-Oct-2001, Zack Weinberg <zack@codesourcery.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 10, 2001 at 04:24:03PM +1000, Fergus Henderson wrote:
> > Note that the rodata and bss sizes are both problematic for the Mercury
> > front-end. The reason is that the Mercury front-end uses the Boehm
> > conservative collector, which scans the bss section and
> > (on most systems) the rodata section. [...]
> That seems strange to me: it does scan rodata and it doesn't scan
> text?
It doesn't scan text on any of the supported systems, AFAIK.
But it does scan rodata on most of them, I think.
> On most systems I am familar with, the boundary between
> (text+rodata) and (data+bss) is obvious, but the boundary between text
> and rodata is not.
That's not the case for most of the systems I'm familiar with.
> I very much hope it doesn't scan rodata, because I
> have Cunning Plans to reduce the text size considerably at the expense
> of a somewhat larger rodata. Note that much of rodata is strings.
What it scans is system-dependent. It's determined by DATASTART and
DATAEND in gcconfig.h. On most systems, DATASTART seems to be defined
as &_etext, and on the systems that I'm familiar with, &_etext generally
precedes the rodata section. (At least that is my understanding.
I could be wrong about that. See below.)
However, on x86 Linux, it does look like the Boehm collector has now
been optimized to not scan rodata, by setting DATASTART to &__data_start
rather than &_etext.
Since your expectation obviously differed from mine here, I tested a few
systems, namely i686-pc-linux-gnu (binutils 2.9.1), alpha-dec-osf3.2,
and i386-pc-solaris2.7. For the first two, &_etext precedes rodata,
but for the last one, it is the other way around.
--
Fergus Henderson <fjh@cs.mu.oz.au> | "I have always known that the pursuit
The University of Melbourne | of excellence is a lethal habit"
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh> | -- the last words of T. S. Garp.