Re: DWARF references crossing shared library boundaries

[todd dot allen at ccur dot com (Todd Allen)]

> 
> Clearly, once you open the door to references from Dwarf in one
> shared library to symbols in another shared library, you implicitly
> require a debugger to not only relocate Dwarf entries relative
> to the current shared library, but also to handle other relocations.
> This requirement holds, even if you never have this situation.
> 

   Yes.  Even as we were doing it, we understood that it would be a burden on
   DWARF consumers.  But the standard goes to quite a bit of trouble to try
   to compress the sizes of the dwarf sections (e.g. abbrevs, lines & cfa
   state machines, leb128 numbers, etc.), without placing too onerous a
   burden on the consumers.  

   We concluded that the burden for cross-shared-object relocations wasn't
   _too_ onerous, and was worth it for the considerable size benefit that we
   could gain with our compilation model.

-- 
Todd Allen
Concurrent Computer Corporation