Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Please review: function epunt_la_files for eutils.eclass

[Mart Raudsepp <leio@gentoo.org>]

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On Sat, 2008-11-15 at 00:05 +0100, Peter Alfredsen wrote:
> Anyway, we really need to start punting .la files one way or the other. 
> For desktop users of our distro, they do a lot more harm than good. For 
> embedded, perhaps static linking serves some purpose, but really, if 
> you can't afford dynamic linking, what are you going to run on your 
> board?

Just to quickly explain the purpose of static linking on embedded - it
has nothing to do with avoiding dynamic linking (run-time?) cost, it has
everything to do with size. If you have a library that only one or few
applications use, you can end up with smaller size through static
linking it, rather than using a shared library of it.
This is because during static linking all functions that are not used
can be discarded from the final binary, while with shared libraries all
the code has to remain, because it isn't know what will be using that
shared library, so the toolchain can not safely discard anything, even
if you just have one application using some big library, but only using
a small subset of its functionality.


-- 
Mart Raudsepp
Gentoo Developer
Mail: leio@gentoo.org
Weblog: http://planet.gentoo.org/developers/leio

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