Re: c++/10776: [3.3 regression] Large aggregate initializers cause GCC to fail

[Pete Gonzalez <gonz@ratloop.com>]

The following reply was made to PR c++/10776; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: Pete Gonzalez <gonz@ratloop.com>
To: Dara Hazeghi <dhazeghi@yahoo.com>
Cc: gcc-gnats@gcc.gnu.org
Subject: Re: c++/10776: [3.3 regression] Large aggregate initializers 
  cause GCC to fail
Date: Wed, 14 May 2003 17:35:29 -0400

 At 01:28 PM 5/14/2003, Dara Hazeghi wrote:
 >Well thank you for the report, and the analysis. I'm
 >not certain how likely this is to get fixed in 3.3.X,
 >but it certainly doesn't hurt to have the report.
 
 We've worked around it.  The larger cause is that, in an aggregate
 initializer, referencing an external pointer causes a
 "__static_initialization_and_destruction" function to be generated.
 GCC implements this with a bunch of assignment instructions, and
 with 2,500 entries in the array, I guess it translates into more
 code than the optimizer can handle.  The general solution would be
 to replace this with a memcpy() -- maybe that's what 3.4 does?
 For my specific problem, I redesigned the data types so that the
 initialization function is not created, which is much more efficient
 in both speed and size.
 
 In this light, the bug becomes obscure and can probably be closed.
 My suggestion is to add some documentation explaining the rules
 behind the compiler's decision to create initialization functions.
 This is particularly important for embedded systems, where the
 initializers cause const data to end up in RAM.
 
 Thanks again for your help,
 -Pete