On 09/16/10 11:11 AM, Miles Bader wrote:
I recently wanted to produce both a standalone executable and a shared library using the same set of object files, and so compiled them all using -fPIC (as "gcc -shared" demeands it). I made my shared lib, and also made a normal executable using these object files -- and I noticed that the resulting executable size was a fair bit smaller (according to the "size" command) than the previous non-fPIC executable I had compiled (using non-fPIC object files). I haven't done any significant amount of benchmarking on it, but it didn't seem obviously slower. [This is on an x86-64 system, using a g++-snapshot from debian: gcc (Debian 20100828-1) 4.6.0 20100828 (experimental) [trunk revision 163616] ] Is there any general wisdom about the effects of using -fPIC, especially on code speed? Would it be stupid for me to set up my configure script to _always_ use -fPIC (even when not needed for a shared library), when it detects that gcc accepts that option? Thanks, -Miles
Well gcc is not the only compiler in use today, and many of the others don't use -fPIC.
Dave
