Vincent Lefevre writes ("Re: Packaging of static libraries"): > On 2016-04-10 14:28:02 +0100, Alastair McKinstry wrote: > > (1) When performance matters. Here we need the static library to be > > built without position independent code. This can still give several > > percent gains depending on arch / programming language. > > Yes, but in that case, the best thing to do is to recompile everything > for the target processor (instead of generic x86_64, for instance), > with LTO. For GMP+MPFR, I noticed a gain of up to 37% a few years ago.
I'm afraid that LTO is probably too dangerous to be used as a substitute for static linking. See my comments in the recent LTO thread here, where I referred to the problem of undefined behaviour, and pointed at John Regehr's blog. Thanks, Ian.