Re: Automaticly eliminating redundant zero initialisers

From: Bradley D. LaRonde (brad@ltc.com)
Date: Mon May 01 2000 - 07:03:47 EST


----- Original Message -----
From: George Anzinger <george@pioneer.net>
To: Tigran Aivazian <tigran@veritas.com>
Cc: Graham Stoney <greyham@research.canon.com.au>; Russell King
<rmk@arm.linux.org.uk>; Linux kernel mailing list
<linux-kernel@vger.rutgers.edu>; <gcc@gcc.gnu.org>
Sent: Monday, May 01, 2000 7:30 AM
Subject: Re: Automaticly eliminating redundant zero initialisers

> Soon as you depend on this some OS dude will fill bss with -1s so he can
> tell what was used... or some such. Seems like a bad idea to depend on
> bss being anything at all.

No. It makes sense to depend on .bss being zero. Not depending on .bss
being zero leaves two poor options:

    1. waste space in the executable image by bloating .data with zeros
    2. complicate and bloat the code with first-time-only initialization
peppered here and there

I welcome an option for gcc to put zero-initialized objects in .bss, even if
it is just a bandage over the real problem.

Regards,
Brad

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