I have a C++ embedded application which has a TON of symbols. Because of the way the target must be built, our link phase takes about 20 minutes on a Sun. Several thousand of the symbols are currently global but can be made local, because they are only used from the one source file that contains them. When developing and fixing bugs, we may do compile / link cycles many times in a day. >From what I understand, all symbols (both local and global) always appear in the symbol table for the GNU tool chain. (Older compilers I worked with didn't expose any local symbols outside of the .o). Would link times get reduced by making a large % of the symbols that are currently global into local (ie, static) symbols? Does the linker do a filtering pass that walks all the objects and libraries in question to build a list of global symbols that it later works on rather than always trying to resolve each symbol off the full list? Splitting the app into smaller executables isn't possible because of the architecture and cross dependencies. Any info anyone can give would be appreciated. Thanks, Dave
