Re: Why is memory footprint smaller when compiled static?

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

Robert A Duff wrote in message ...
>> I realize that a lot of systems don't do this, and I've never
understood
>> why: it isn't particularly hard nor very expensive, and it can save a
>> lot of space (it saves nearly 1 megabyte of code size in the Claw
>> Builder, for example).
>
>I agree -- linkers ought to do this.
>
>But it's harder to do a good job with indirect calls (dispatching),
>which you didn't have to worry about in Ada 83.


Not much harder. Janus/Ada 3.1.2 (unreleased as of now because of
optimization problems unrelated to trimming) has done this for more than
a year. It is very valuable with Claw. It does increase the amount of
stuff that has to be saved for the linker (an indication of dispatching
calls with their tag slot numbers), but it actually turned out to be
much easier to implement than I expected (took less than a week).

                Randy.