Richard Earnshaw <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > We spend a lot of time printing out the results of compilation as > assembly language, only to have to parse it all again in the assembler. > Given some of the problems this proposal throws up I think we should > seriously look at bypassing as much of this step as possible, and of > generating object files from directly in the compiler. Ultimately we'd > only need to parse assembly statements for inline asm constructs.
I certainly think that is a good idea, and it is one which has been discussed before. But I think this is really a separate issue which should not be confused with the link time optimization proposal. I think the symbol table issues are a red herring. The only troublesome case is when using both a non-GNU assembler and a non-GNU debugger, and even then the worst case is some difficulty with naming static functions and variables (we can rename them using a suitable mangled source file name as a suffix so that it is still possible to find them, albeit awkward). I think that if we lay down an appropriate trail, other tool developers will follow soon enough. Ian
