🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1ukt40INNt8o@senator-bedfellow.MIT.EDU>
	jfc@athena.mit.edu writes:

> One option to reduce the total size of gcc binaries is to make the
> back end into a shared library.  Last time I heard, rms was opposed
> to doing this, but there's nothing stopping someone from doing it
> independently.  That would save between .5 MB and 1 MB per compiler
> after the first.

I tried this with GCC 2.3.3 on SunOS 5.1 (SVR4), and the space savings
are indeed quite impressive (actually a bit more than a megabyte par
compiler on the SPARC):

liasun6% cd /logiciels/distribution/public/gnu/sun4-5.1/lib/gcc-lib/sparc-sun-solaris2.1/2.3.3
liasun6% /usr/ccs/bin/size cc1* libbackend.so
cc1: 178928 + 4400 + 1352 = 184680
cc1obj: 225448 + 4760 + 1904 = 232112
cc1plus: 541552 + 5944 + 8508 = 556004
libbackend.so: 1222694 + 48752 + 43956 = 1315402
liasun6% cd ../2.4.1
liasun6% !/
/usr/ccs/bin/size cc1* libbackend.so
cc1: 1299848 + 12468 + 62812 = 1375128
cc1obj: 1368392 + 12740 + 63356 = 1444488
cc1plus: 1650792 + 12540 + 69112 = 1732444
size: libbackend.so: cannot open

It is a bit hairy to automate the installation, because the ways how
shared libraries are created and used vary so wildly between systems.
Autoconf should be extended to handle shared libraries (this would
also be very useful for libraries like readline or bfd!).

Anyway, for SVR4 shared libraries it is quite trivial to hack the
configure-generated Makefile to put all the $(OBJS) files into a
shared library, and use this library when linking the cc1* programs,
rather than the $(OBJS).
-- 
Simon.