Re: Linking Experience

I once had some figures form an Ada linker telling
that the ratio
    (number of used labels)/(number of defined labels)
was about 0.6 counted for several programs.


Additionally the distribution of the number of uses of procedures shows that
only very rarely (less than half of the uses of labels) a label was used more
than once. Most of the multiple used procedures were from the standard
library (e.g. put which is responsible for output).


I believe, that similar figures are true for any modular language (or any
language having classes). Based on these figures I believe that using smart
linkers would save considerable amounts of disk space.


Btw. unix linkers are semi smart, by the use of ar archives.


Martin Leiser leiser@ibiza.karlsruhe.gmd.de
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