Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
See the -mergefunc compiler switch of LDC, to merge identical
functions (like ones produced by template instantiations). This
feature is not very powerful yet, but it's present and I have seen it
works.
Indeed. I'm no expert in linkers, but in my opinion this is one of the
most basic optimizations a linker should perform. And C++ has pushed
linkers to do that for years now so I'd expect most linkers to do that
already...
The problem with templates are more the multiple slightly different
instanciations. In general this is good for performance, but it's only
needed for the code paths that need to be fast. I think generic
containers should be fast.
There's been talk that Walter's slow porting of the linker to C and then
D will put him in the position to introduce such an optimization.
Unfortunately, it's an agonizingly slow process. It also does nothing for Linux
or OSX.
