What is "init_dummy"?

[Benjamin Redelings I]

Hi, thanks for answering.

Jeffrey A Law wrote:
> 
>   In message < 34B04545.B0FD46B5@ucsd.edu >you write:
>   > Hi, I've been profiling (gprof) some code generated by egcs 971225, and
>   > I keep getting random references to "init_dummy".  Is this intensional?
>   > Is there some documentation on what "init_dummy" is, so that I can guess
>   > what the profiling output means?
> It's part of the global ctor/dtor support code as well as code to handle
> registration of exception handling information.
> 
> jeff

	Hmm... perhaps there is a problem here.  I was trying to find out why
init_dummy takes 77% of the CPU time in my program.  It isn't because
I'm using a bad test case... Most of the CPU time is NOT spent
initializing global constructurs, but in actual processing. (I can tell
because the program is interactive).
	Of course, non-global constructors & destructors are called throughout
the code (its a symbolic code, not a numerical one).
	Basically the problem seems to be that lots of functions are calling
"init_dummy" w/o cause.  Although I tried compiling my code with "g++
-Wall -g3 -pg -fno-exceptions -O6 -fno-inline -DNDEBUG", gprof still
lists very simple functions as calling init_dummy once each time they
are invoked.  For example (to extract a line from my code):
class Stream { 
 ...
  IndexI<pof>& Stream::data(int i) {return *filters[i].data;}
 ...
};

This line basically does nothing more than subscript and return a
pointer (well, a reference).  This would normally be inlined...  Does it
really need to call init_dummy?

Thanks,
-BenRI