Hi Bob,
On Fri, Sep 25, 2020 at 10:45 AM Bob Friesenhahn < bfrie...@simple.dallas.tx.us> wrote: > On Fri, 25 Sep 2020, Oleg Smolsky wrote: > > > Well, AFAIK any well-formed .a file (an archive) is a static lib. And > these > > can be passed to the linker. Are you saying that libtool extracts the > > individual .o files instead passing -lfoo (for libfoo.a)? > > Exactly! It might as well be a tar file except that the 'ar' archiver > knows how to add/update/remove files from it and that is not possible > with a tar file. The ability to do incremental updates of the archive > file is important as objects are built/rebuilt. The 'make' program > itself already understands archive files. > I did not know this about libtool and convenience libraries. Do you have any historical notion of why this was done? I ask because this sort of behaviour total defeats the linker's ability to discard unused objects, does it not? Thanks, John
