[fpc-devel] inline... and philosophy

[Michael Van Canneyt]

On Sat, 9 Nov 2019, J. Gareth Moreton wrote:

>> I tend to think more size gains can be obtained from more aggressive 
>> smartlinking.
>> The smartlinking is sometimes disabled by the way code is written.
>>
>> To give an example, pas2js has a switch to convert published to public 
>> sections. As a result, the published sections are suddenly reduced to 
>> what is actually used in code. This produces significant size gains.
>>
>> Michael.
>> _______________________________________________
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>>
> That's true.  That's mentioned in the "size matters" article. I didn't 
> know about 'published' until then.  Presumably, if that switch doesn't 
> exist (like with most of the LCL), I gather the only way to strip out 
> those unused published sections is some very intelligent whole-program 
> optimisation, and even then it may not work if a string (to access a 
> property name) is not deterministic.

WPO will not cut it, since the properties are usually loaded from a stream
which can be an external file or a resource. You simply do not know and have
no way to know. That is why all published variables are always kept.

Michael.