RE: Link performance: some numbers and a hack

[Iñaki García Etxebarria]

Hi,

> Consider also that older versions of Libtool (IIRC 1.4.2) used to
> keep track of duplicate dependency libs by default.  That means there
> could be a list of libs longer than the rest of the link line, and
> this was often the case.  The link performance in one of my projects
> went from Inf/NaN to 10 minutes with the duplicates removed.  ;)
I remember that, yes :-) I'm using 1.4.3 and 1.5 currently, where this
doesn't happen.

> The other thing to consider is that it is often a very good idea to
> make sure every symbol in your library is resolved so it is more
> portable (by forcing a link error for unresolved symbols).  This
> isn't possible without bringing along the dependencies even
> when building shared objects (under Solaris for instance).
Agree we do, but generic the problem is ;-) In other words, apart from
fixing my own projects (where I already do some preprocessing to keep
link times reasonable) I would like to find a way to fix it in libtool,
so compiling other (gnome) stuff doesn't suck so badly.

Iñaki