Question

I have a huge project written in C++. It’s all split into multiple static libraries that are eventually linked into one final shared library which has to export only a few simple functions.

If I do objdump of that final .so I see all my internal names etc. Because it uses long class names and namespaces these strings become excessively long and as a result final binary is big.

So, my question is how do I do it properly with GCC to make sure that all these internal functions do not show up in the final binary?

I’m aware about all these GCC-specific visibility modifiers, I use -fvisibility=hidden -fvisibility-inlines-hidden, I use -Wl,–no-whole-archive. I disable c++ exceptions and rtti (-fno-exceptions -fno-rtti) but i still can’t get GCC to generate my final .so that doesn’t contain names of my namespaces and classes that aren’t supposed to be there at all!

I tried to use -Wl,–version-script= to control which functions should be visible, but still I see lot’s of internal names in final stripped shared object. I read multiple similar entries on SO, but don’t see anything that does the job.
Note: I compile for multiple platforms (Linux, Windows, iPhone etc) and only on windows in VS I don’t have any problems.

thanks

Answer 1

You might want to try the --retain-symbols-file linker option when linking the final .so file (-Wl,--retain-symbols-file=filename) to specify JUST the symbols you want to keep (export) and delete everything else. The file is just a text file with symbols (one per line) to keep.