Re: inline (Was: Bloat)

[Matt Fleming <matt%console-pimps.org@localhost>]

On Thu, Feb 12, 2009 at 11:00:24AM -0500, der Mouse wrote:
> > The biggest problem with doing global optimization is structural: in
> > Unix the compiler is expected to behave a certain way with respect to
> > object files, and object files have a fixed format and well known
> > semantics.
> 
> Not all that much so.  For example, if you were to turn .o files into a
> serialization of gcc's internal "tree" structure (I'm handwaving
> tremendously here, I know), the disruption for almost all uses of .o
> files would probably be no greater than the disruption caused by
> switching from a.out to ELF.
> 

There's on-going work for lto (link-time optimisations) for gcc and binutils,
mainly from the guys at google.