Re: A cheap performance optimization

[James Henstridge <james jamesh id au>]

Matthias Clasen wrote:

> One of the compiler people here at RedHat complained to me that most of
> Gnome is linked with --export-dynamic, which really bloats both the size
> and the load times (although prelink may alleviate that a bit). The ld
> documentation contains exact details about when --export-dynamic is
> needed, but it is never needed for libraries, and in most cases, it is
> not needed for apps either. 
>  
It is also worth noting that --export-dynamic breaks libtool's 
-export-symbols and -export-symbols-regex options, causing all symbols 
in a library to be exported.

> Currently, most of Gnome gets --export-dynamic from gmodule-2.0.pc,
> which is required by many libraries. Fortunately, with GLib 2.6, fixing
> this is as easy as requiring gmodule-no-export-2.0.pc instead of
> gmodule-2.0.pc. For completeness, I just added gmodule-export-2.0.pc as
> well.
>
> It would be a nice goal for Gnome 2.10 to replace all uses of
> gmodule-2.0.pc by either gmodule-no-export-2.0.pc or gmodule-
> export-2.0.pc (I guess the latter will be rarely needed).
>  
I'm not sure how much use the gmodule-no-export-2.0.pc file will be for 
applications using GTK, since gmodule-2.0 is a dependency of gtk+-2.0.pc 
(so "pkg-config --libs gtk+-2.0" includes --export-dynamic).

Neither prepending or appending "gmodule-no-export-2.0" to the 
pkg-config module list changes this, and having no-export variants for 
every pkg-config file sitting on top of gmodule doesn't seem like a very 
robust solution.

James.