Re: big number of relocations in gtk2 binding

[muppet <scott asofyet org>]

On Feb 9, 2008, at 2:49 PM, Torsten Schoenfeld wrote:

> Nice.  With this applied, I see a 9% size reduction of the shared  
> object
> (11MiB -> 10MiB, with debugging symbols) and a 7% start speedup  
> (0.067s
> -> 0.062s, measured via timing many runs of `perl -MGtk2 -e'exit'´).
>
> I had to add one more closing parentheses at the end of the definition
> of __hidden__ to make it compile, though.

D'oh!   That's what i get for editing patch files directly.


> If defined, we could use G_GNUC_INTERNAL (from glib >= 2.6).

Good point.  That supports the Sun Pro compiler, too.


I put a new version of the patch at http://asofyet.org/muppet/software/gtk2-perl/relocations-2.patch 
 .

Diffstat says:

   213 files changed, 328 insertions(+), 226 deletions(-)

and relinfo.pl says:

   267 relocations, 228 relative (85%), 3845 PLT entries, 26 for  
local syms (0%), 0 users

That's 85% versus 76% with the previous patch, and a drop of 3 PLTs.   
Nearly all of the PLTs are for things from dependent libraries, so  
there's not much we can do about that.

This patch is slightly more invasive.  Move __hidden__ to the  
beginning, since we prefer G_GNUC_INTERNAL if it's available from  
GLib.  Add include guards to gtk2perlinternal.h.  In gtk2perl- 
private.h, add the hidden attribute to the private-but-shared symbols  
declared there.  Add static to several helper functions which appear  
to have been missed by oversight.  And, the real win, also use hidden  
visibility in Gtk2.xs, by adding this change to the end of the file:

@@ -626,3 +626,15 @@ bool
 PANGO_CHECK_VERSION (class, int major, int minor, int micro)
     C_ARGS:
        major, minor, micro
+
+
+
+##
+## WARNING: FRAGILE!
+## xsubpp will generate the BOOT section, specifically boot_Gtk2(),  
after
+## this point in the file.  We need boot_Gtk2() to be callable from  
outside
+## our .so, so undo the visibility magic before that function is  
defined.
+##
+
+#undef __hidden__
+#define __hidden__


Is the optimization worth all these shenanigans?  Should we worry  
about stuff like internal uses of exported functions (e.g.  
gtk2perl_new_gtkobject(), which is called in ~270 places)?


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