The Compact C Type Format in the GNU toolchain

... now why didn't I think of that? Probably because when I was doing this back when I had *multiple* sections to deal with, with names like .ctf.*, so telling other things what the sections were called this time would have been quite painful. We have our own internal container format now precisely to avoid this sort of problem, so we could use this quite well.

> That is not my intention. Note that I am a not a native English speaker. My apologies if I seem to come over as negative.

Sorry, I completely misparsed your sentence! (See my comment a couple of hops down). Phew, that had me panicking a bit for a moment. :)

> Now that we have it maybe we should make .symtab a compressed section?

Compressed sections in GNU ld at least seem a bit ad hoc. I think you'd need to do quite a lot of work to bfd_elf_final_link and environs to make it possible to have allocated sections that other sections depend upon that are also compressed: every existing section with content that changes after layout time (earlier in bfd_elf_final_link than strtab / symtab layout time) either has unchanging size or is non-allocated (and even there, there are fairly dreadful hacks around .zdebug, which I'm afraid I made a little bit worse with .ctf :) ).

I'm not sure .symtab would compress terribly well, either -- it has a lot of fields with "ID-like" content that only appears once, and thus compresses rather badly. (CTF goes to some lengths to avoid content like this for just that reason). The strtab would certainly compress better, but I can see why you don't compress it -- you don't want to impose decompression costs on the whole strtab on every execution.

> Really, I don't understand why you think that is my intention.

A really terrible misparsing of an ambiguous sentence on my part, and you know how hard it is to find alternate meanings of a sentence when you've already fixated on one that is dreadful :) Sorry!

> Will you be at the GNU Tools Cauldron in Montréal, Canada next week?

Alas, I'm going to LPC instead. I'm spending the next two weeks listening to chamber music in the North York moors...