Re: [openvrml-develop] build-time memory consumption

[Braden M. <br...@en...>]

Sam Hocevar wrote:
>    Hello,
> 
>    I am the Debian maintainer for OpenVRML and I am having great trouble
> getting it to build on all our architectures, because of g++'s insane
> memory usage when lots of templates are involved.
> 
>    I know the problem lies mostly with g++, but if anyone with the
> skills could have a look at browser.cpp and vrml97node.cpp in the
> src/libopenvrml/openvrml/ directory, it would be much appreciated.
> There must be a way to split these files so that g++'s memory usage
> drops below 100MB (currently 150MB for browser.cpp and 350MB for
> vrml97node.cpp on my x86 computer).

The problem with breaking a lot of this stuff up into multiple files is 
that it results in unnecessarily exposing symbols. Nearly everything in 
vrml97node.cpp is implementation details with a single exposed entry 
point. And while there are some small parts of browser.cpp that could 
probably be broken out, the overwhelming majority of its heft is also 
implementation details that should not be exposed.

Breaking stuff up means more private header files (yuck) and massaging 
the linker to keep from unnecessarily exposing symbols--and my 
impression is that libtool's support for that is rather weak.

Note that the code in vrml97node.cpp will be broken out into its own 
dlopen'd module in the future. (Probably not in the 0.16 time frame; but 
very likely for 0.17.) The plan is for these (and other) node 
implementations to live in their own modules through which the supported 
node set can be easily extended.

Braden