[MLton-user] A few questions

[Matthew Fluet]

On Wed, 12 Dec 2007, Matthew Fluet wrote:
>>  Thanks, the "strip"ing was the problem.  Sorry,  newbie mistake.  After
>>  stripping,  the executable size goes down from 60MB to 28MB,  which is
>>  great.   By the way,  is it possible to instruct MLton not to put the
>>  labels there in the first place (as opposed to stripping them afterwards)?
>
> MLton produces assembly as text files that are passed to gcc/as.  So, there's 
> no way for MLton to use less labels; they are necessary in the assembly 
> files.

Looking into this a little more, it seems that assemblers normally do not 
retain 'local symbols', though 'local symbols' are a syntactic criterion 
depending on the platform object format: .LXXXX for ELF, LXXXX for a.out, 
"LXXXX" for Mach-O.  Unfortunately, we tend to produce labels like 
LXXXX or _LXXXX, so they are not considered local.  (I always just assumed 
that any symbol defined in an assembly file that wasn't .globl was a local 
symbol.)