Conceptually, the implementation is pretty straightforward: we put each
literal value into a hashtable, and then write out the keys of that
hashtable at the end.
In contrast with ELF, the Mach-O format does not support variable-length
literals that aren't strings. Its literals are either 4, 8, or 16 bytes
in length. LLD-ELF dedups its literals via sorting + uniq'ing, but since
we don't need to worry about overly-long values, we should be able to do
a faster job by just hashing.
That said, the implementation right now is far from optimal, because we
add to those hashtables serially. To parallelize this, we'll need a
basic concurrent hashtable (only needs to support concurrent writes w/o
interleave reads), which shouldn't be to hard to implement, but I'd like
to punt on it for now.
Numbers for linking chromium_framework on my 3.2 GHz 16-Core Intel Xeon W:
N Min Max Median Avg Stddev x 20 4.27 4.39 4.315 4.3225 0.033225703 + 20 4.36 4.82 4.44 4.4845 0.13152846 Difference at 95.0% confidence 0.162 +/- 0.0613971 3.74783% +/- 1.42041% (Student's t, pooled s = 0.0959262)
This corresponds to binary size savings of 2MB out of 335MB, or 0.6%.
It's not a great tradeoff as-is, but as mentioned our implementation can
be signficantly optimized, and literal dedup will unlock more
opportunities for ICF to identify identical structures that reference
the same literals.
What is the purpose of the braces around these case bodies?