Re: GNAT Codesize

[john@assen.demon.co.uk (John McCabe)]

dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) wrote:

>John McCabe said

<..snip..>

>Yes, exactly, symbol table type information. Yes you could keep it in
>a separate file, but 

>(a) it would not save any disk space to have two files instead of one

Good point, however there would be the advantage that when you wanted
to ditch it, you just have to delete the symbol file without touching
the executable.

>(b) you don't load the symbol information, so it would not save load time

But don't you still have to decide which bits to load and not to load?
If you didn't have to make that decision, there presumably would be
some [probably unnoticeable] reduction in the load time.

>(c) it would violate system standards, which are to keep debugging 
>	information in the objects and executables. The GNAT approach
>	is deliberately system standard compatible to allow use of
>	standard debuggers.

Yes, that appears reasonable. Obviously this tends not to be so
important in the cross-compilation systems I mentioned as they must
provide their own proprietary debuggers and processor simulators.

>Presumbaly Meridian kept debugging information in some non-standard
>proprietary format (as did and do many other Ada compilers).

Looking back at what I was doing, I think the Meridian default is not
to produce debugging information.


Best Regards
John McCabe <john@assen.demon.co.uk>