GCC IMA & general future proposal

[Joe Buck]

On Wed, Oct 27, 2004 at 11:55:49AM -0600, Jeffrey A Law wrote:
> On Wed, 2004-10-27 at 19:49 +0200, Jan Hubicka wrote:
> > > 
> > > This may be a stupid suggestion and is probably not as general
> > > as what EDG is doing but couldn't the template instantiations be
> > > put into special sections and then let ld eliminate the duplicates
> > > as it merges the object files into the executable?
> > 
> > This is what GCC does currently, but it results in very many
> > instantiations being compiled just to be thrown away that consumes time
> > and disc space.
> Right.  And I get customers who complain about this on a pretty
> consistent basis.  This scheme slows down compilation time, link time
> and eats a ton of disk space.

But the alternative of repeatedly recompiling until no more templates
are instantiated can also be wasteful and slow.  I haven't yet seen a
scheme that really wins over what GCC is doing now, if you consider the
effect of corrupt repository databases, library closure issues and the
like.