Re: Dropping tsort for archive creation

[Joerg Sonnenberger <joerg%britannica.bec.de@localhost>]

On Thu, Jul 02, 2015 at 09:13:26PM -0400, Greg Troxel wrote:
> 
> Joerg Sonnenberger <joerg%britannica.bec.de@localhost> writes:
> 
> > in the old days, sorting archive members topologically helped to improve
> > build time. I don't think it provides a significant advantage anymore as
> > most systems will keep the archives in memory during linking and lookup
> > is generally helped by the index.
> 
> My memory is fuzzy, but I remember more or less that in the really old
> days (late 70s), .o files inside .a were tsorted so that linkers that
> only went through once and added a .o to the binary if it resolved
> unknown symbols would work, instead of needing multiple passes.  So I
> have always seen this as necessary (or formerly necessary), rather than
> as a speed thing.  It could well be that such linkers are totally
> extinct.

ELF linkers are required to threat archives as a group, so much behavior
is not needed.

> Did your test build actually make static binaries?   It seems that in
> current NetBSD, the only think static is /rescue.

The shared library build also exercises archive processing.

Joerg