Re: Mandatory -dbg packages for libraries?
On Tue, May 08, 2007 at 02:23:37PM +0200, Josselin Mouette wrote:
> Le lundi 07 mai 2007 à 13:02 +0200, Wouter Verhelst a écrit :
> > > Dropping most .a libraries is something I agree with. I see no reason
> > > why we should have them for most of the libraries.
> >
> > As a courtesy to our users. Statically linked programs are slightly
> > faster (since they don't need to do PLT lookups, so they spare a jump on
> > every function call to a shared object). For people for whom performance
> > is critical, providing .a libraries is a good idea.
>
> Hm, I thought the double-jump issue was specific to i386. On other
> architectures, there is still the need for an extra register, but AIUI
> the performance impact should be much smaller.
I'm not entirely sure about the specifics, and especially not across
architectures; but regardless, doing a PLT lookup is more expensive than
doing a function call to something that was statically linked in.
Especially if the the function call was optimized away, which just might
theoretically be possible using static libraries but is out of the
question using shared ones :)
--
Shaw's Principle:
Build a system that even a fool can use, and only a fool will
want to use it.
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