simulating section-gc with ar-archives?

[Ian Lance Taylor]

Adam Megacz <adam@megacz.com> writes:

> If I understand correctly, ld will ignore any unreferenced .o's in an
> ar-archive when linking. So if foo.a contains bar.o and baz.o, and
> baz.o is never referenced, baz.o will not be included in the final
> executable.

Correct.

> Does this mean that you could simulate section-gc by breaking all your
> .o's up so that each file contained exactly one section, wrapping it
> all up in a .a, and linking that?

Yes, if you can break up the .o files, then this will accomplish what
you want.

However, breaking up a .o after the fact is not necessarily trivial,
and is in the general case impossible, because there is no way to
correctly handle references to file static variables and functions.

Ian