Re: New Feature Submission for GNU Make

[Howard Chu]

Edward Welbourne wrote:
> > Pretty weak. If a few more include paths were added to the project it would
> > still break, regardless of your patch.
>
> When you have thousands of object files, shortening the name of each
> by several bytes when invoking ar can make room for really quite a lot
> more files before you run up against the command-line length limit.
>
> Never understimate the value of a modest shortening of file names -
> when our ar command-line got to about 230 kibibytes, we had to re-work
> the way we invoked ar !

Whatever you're doing, you're doing it wrong. ;)

If you're tossing a bunch of object files into an ar library simply for 
grouping purposes, and all of the object files will eventually be used in the 
final executable, it's faster to use ld -r and combine groups of them all into 
a single object file. If you profiled your build I'm sure you would find that 
a large percentage of time is being wasted in ar itself.

And if you're really running a build with thousands of object files, on a 
frequent basis, you're foolish not to profile it and figure out what else 
you're doing wrong. Giant monolithic command lines also prevent you from 
leveraging parallel make, so that's another reason not to do things that way...

--
  -- Howard Chu
  CTO, Symas Corp.           http://www.symas.com
  Director, Highland Sun     http://highlandsun.com/hyc/
  Chief Architect, OpenLDAP  http://www.openldap.org/project/