Re: Changing .dynstr to be more C++ friendly?

[Chris Kirby <ckirby at laurelnetworks dot com>]

At 12:17 PM 2/24/2005 +1030, Alan Modra wrote:
>On Wed, Feb 23, 2005 at 02:22:50PM -0500, Chris Kirby wrote:
>> My thinking was that we could change the definition of an Elf symbol
>> to not contain a single name, but rather N distinct name components
>> (3 in this case). 
>
>I think you underestimate the scope of the change you are proposing.
>This would require changes to all consumers of ELF files, which means
>more than just the assembler and linker.  Debuggers, ld.so, etc.

I was hoping that they all used bfd or liberty so we would only have to change it there.  If everyone has there own code to interact with ELF files, then I agree it would be too large of a change to be feasible right now.  If ELF is ever revised, it would be nice to consider ways to compress the dynamic strings for languages other than just C. 

For our embedded application, I am wondering how feasible it would be to change the symbol names to something shorter.  As long as the application and the shared library are in agreement in what the symbol names are, it should not matter what they are.  This would allow us to come up with a more compact naming scheme than the current C++ name mangler.  I could imagine a post processing step after the application and libraries are built where the current names in use are found, converted to a shorter representation, and then replaced.

- Chris