Re: [boost] [outcome] Inline GDB pretty printing support

On 02/07/2024 13:09, Julien Blanc via Boost wrote:

2 juillet 2024 à 12:58 "Andrey Semashev via Boost" a écrit:

...

Also, on the topic of binary size, is this script embedded into the final binary only once, even if the header is included in multiple TUs?

That (binary size) was also one of my concern, i checked the following :

* the whole section is correctly stripped when stripping debug symbols (and correctly preserved in the external debug symbols file) * multiple sections works correctly * the section is indeed only added once in the final binary

(for what it's worth, tests done with gcc x64, gcc cross-compiling to arm32 and clang x64, no issues with any of these configurations)

Note that linkers don't have to honour the merge section request if they don't want to. Furthermore, some may ignore merging sections of null terminated strings, like these. The merging algorithm which GNU ld seems to use is stick all the sections into a hash table keyed by the hash of the section contents, thus eliminating all exact duplicates. It then emits an unpredictable sequence of appended strings. You therefore need to be careful that any Python you write can be safely #included with any other Python in any arbitrary order. If there is any difference at all, that causes a copy to be emitted, so if you ever change the string and a user mixes binary versions, you'll get two of the visualisers or more. You need to write your visualiser to cope with that, too. I didn't test other linkers apart from ld well, though from first glance GNU gold appears to do the right thing. I didn't try other linkers. Niall