On Fri, 2006-09-15 at 09:27 -0700, Ian Lance Taylor wrote: > >> I think Danny has a 75% implementation based on hashing the RTL for a > >> section and using that to select the COMDAT section signature. Or the > >> hashing can be done in the linker, but it still needs compiler help to > >> know when it is permissible.
On 9/15/06, Laurent GUERBY <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >For code sections (I assume read-only), isn't the linker always able to > >merge identical ones? What can the compiler do better than the linker? On Fri, Sep 15, 2006 at 02:46:12PM -0400, Daniel Berlin wrote: > The linker doesn't know what the code does. The compiler does. > Therefore, the compiler always can do a better job, as it can > correctly identify more things as doing the same thing. It seems to me that most candidates for merging that could be eliminated by this approach are of the form std::container<PodT>::some_method(...) where PodT is a POD type. But it might be better to refactor the library so that all container functions that, for PODs, depend only on the size of the objects in question, use common code.
