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Hal Black <black at ieee dot org> writes:
It means that including any class with a static initializer in a .a file would mean that that class would be included in all programs linked with that .a file.
Yes. That's the desired behavior. If a developer were to develop a library with a static initializer with side-effects, it would be something that should be called whenever that library was used.
No Unix linker has ever worked that way.
Also, while this is not the reason for not making the change, it turns out that it is not an efficient change to make. It would require the linker to examine every object in every archive, which obviates the entire point of having archives in the first place. Again, this inefficiency, while severe, is not the reason for not making the change; the reason for not making the change is that ld and ar implement behaviour which has not changed for decades, and should not be changed now.
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