[I don't think it's off-topic at all] Linking speed for C++

[Richard Henderson]

On Wed, May 09, 2001 at 05:01:18PM -0700, Joe Buck wrote:
> Or, of course, just break the ability to overload symbols for virtual
> functions. :-)  The user waiting for his desktop to start up may not
> care.

Recently some symbol visibility flags were added to ELF.  It
would be possible to change the compiler such that

  class __attribute__((visibility(protected))) Foo
  {
  ...
  };

marked each member symbol of Foo with STV_PROTECTED, which
prevents this symbol from being overridden by another DSO.

Judicious use of this feature might reduce the number of
symbol relocations (vs relative relocations) substantially.



r~