OK to merge the fw? libraries in framework?

[Michael Stahl]

On 08/02/12 18:10, Tor Lillqvist wrote:
> While trying to find easy ways to lower the number of (shared)
> libraries, which is more or less on the critical path for the Android
> work (the stupid run-time linker on Android has a low (from our
> perverse perspective) limit on the number of shared libraries that can
> be used at a time in a process), I started looking at the libraries
> built in the "framework" module (mnemonically and self-documentingly
> named fwe, fwi, fwk, fwl and fwm).

well, yes, obviously the fwe stands for "framework exports", fwi for
"framework imports", fwk for "framework", fwl for "framework library"
and "fwm" for "framework module"... no actually i just made that up ;)

> Is there any fundamental problem in just shoving all the objects in
> framework into one library (for instance the "fwk" one, or one renamed
> to the perhaps more logical name "framework")?

AFAIK this module caused huge problems when gbuild-ifying on Windows
(specifically because of the weird DLLPUBLIC things going on there), so
in any case please test if it works on Windows before pushing such a change.

> My guess is that the framework code might originally have gone into
> just one shared library, anybody know the reason why it was split up
> into five separate ones?

hmm... no idea, perhaps mba remembers the rationale?

oh, one thing: probably some libs are required at startup and others
not; so merging all in one brings a startup performance penalty (but
even then 2 libs should be enough?)

> (Obviously the corresponding component files will have to be merged,
> too, and references to the libraries changed to reference fwk (only)
> instead in various places.)
> 
> --tml