DMD 0.153 release

[Walter Bright]

Derek Parnell wrote:
> On Tue, 11 Apr 2006 11:43:28 +1000, Derek Parnell wrote:
>> On Mon, 10 Apr 2006 18:25:49 -0700, Walter Bright wrote:
>>> Naw. "smart linking" is a marketing term that appeared in the 1980's 
>>> that refers to the linker discarding unreferenced code sections. Since 
>>> it's a bit of jargon, I italicized it. Optlink has been doing it for 15+ 
>>> years, ld only recently.
>> Is a 'code section' equivalent to a D module? In other words, if I have
>> three D modules, each one is in its own unique code section. And thus if
>> I'm not referencing anything in one of those modules and I include the
>> module.obj in the command line, the linker will discard that module from
>> the resulting executable file?
>>
>> Or is 'code section' more finely grained than that, say down to the
>> function level?
> 
> Never mind, I just did a test and it seems to be at the function level.
> That is, optlink discards functions that are not referenced even if other
> functions in the same module are referenced.

Each module is made up of multiple sections. Smart linking relies on the 
compiler emitting a separate section for each function. You can see this 
by running obj2asm on it.