Omitting unused methods from a class?

Forum 2005-2010 (read only) Software Syntax & Programs
1

Is there a way to omit or garbage collect methods in a class that are never actually referenced from the sketch (similar to the way normal C functions are GC'ed)

Actually, this seems to be happening SOME of the time. A serial.print("Hello World") program does not end up including the code for floating point print, but it DOES include Serial.peek Serial.read, and Serial.available, and I can't see what 's different between Serial and Print...

2

Print writes to a memory buffer in SRAM...
Serial writes to the HW UART FTDI buffer...

u r right, the linker (avr-gcc) should just included the necessary functions...
i will chk it and be right back... :slight_smile:

  1. cont'd
    hum... it seems like virtual methods r always used (for some address table inherent to each object, iirc), so that the compiler mistakens that use as a "necessary" use (which it is not)...

-arne

3

Arne,

in order to allow overriding, virtual functions store a pointer to the current version of the implementation. Thus it will make your object in RAM bigger and the compiler seems to be rather conservative when getting rid of them.

Korman

4

not just in RAM...

program storage will be used unnecessarily, 2...

-arne