Re: [Bug ld/20152] constructors for c++ objects are sometimes discarded when linked via a .a archive

[Nick Clifton]

Hi Dave,

>   * if foo.o is linked directly into an executable, f's ctor is run before
> "main".
>   * if foo.o is linked into a .a and then that .a is linked into an 
> executable,
> f's ctor may or may not be run before "main".  The constructor is only run if
> there's at least one symbol in foo.o that's referenced by the main program.

Right - this is the intended behaviour.

> Note that although the C++ object f isn't used, f's ctor may have interesting
> side-effects that need to happen; the parameters may reference things that 
> need
> to be linked (in my case I was using it to register unit testing functions 
> with
> a test runner).

Unfortunately the linker is unable to detect these interesting side-effects, and
so it cannot know that the object's constructor is actually needed.


> I don't know if this behavior is a bug, but this is sufficiently surprising to
> me that I wanted to capture it somewhere with a URL; it seems like a "gotcha"
> to me  (it took me a couple of days of stepping through the link of gcc to
> track down).

Did you read the linker documentation when you were looking for an answer ?
I was wondering whether it would be worthwhile adding a paragraph there to cover
this situation, in the hopes of helping future programmers.

Cheers
  Nick