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NDK best practices documentation

Open enh opened this issue 6 years ago • 1 comments

https://github.com/android-ndk/ndk/issues/748#issuecomment-411862124 had this:

I agree with the first suggestion to use the -f*-sections only for the static library.

As for the defaults, I don't think -fdata-sections is universally useful. If a function refers to multiple global data, each global needs its own section start address. Without -fdata-sections, there'd just be a reference to the data section and two offsets into it. https://stackoverflow.com/a/29951897 has a more detailed explanation. However, the flag is useful or a wash for libc++ since it has few, if any, global data.

So -ffunction-sections, while ensuring that --gc-sections is passed to the linker, seems like a good default.

OTOH, I could also make the case for not setting either and leaving the user to consider the trade-offs and opt into whatever behavior they want. Granted there's greater potential benefit (in terms of size) with setting this flag and a smaller potential disadvantage (in terms of execution speed).

I guess it all comes down to informed choice - if there's a best-practices guide for the NDK, this trade-off should be mentioned there.

we should probably have a best practices doc, and add stuff like this.

enh avatar Aug 10 '18 22:08 enh

https://android.googlesource.com/platform/ndk/+/master/docs/BuildSystemMaintainers.md covers some aspects of this, but we can definitely do better.

DanAlbert avatar Oct 17 '22 23:10 DanAlbert