On Sat, 2008-11-15 at 00:05 +0100, Peter Alfredsen wrote: > Anyway, we really need to start punting .la files one way or the other. > For desktop users of our distro, they do a lot more harm than good. For > embedded, perhaps static linking serves some purpose, but really, if > you can't afford dynamic linking, what are you going to run on your > board?
Just to quickly explain the purpose of static linking on embedded - it has nothing to do with avoiding dynamic linking (run-time?) cost, it has everything to do with size. If you have a library that only one or few applications use, you can end up with smaller size through static linking it, rather than using a shared library of it. This is because during static linking all functions that are not used can be discarded from the final binary, while with shared libraries all the code has to remain, because it isn't know what will be using that shared library, so the toolchain can not safely discard anything, even if you just have one application using some big library, but only using a small subset of its functionality. -- Mart Raudsepp Gentoo Developer Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Weblog: http://planet.gentoo.org/developers/leio
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