Re: How can I get this data into the .data section of the binary?

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

"Luke A. Guest" <laguest@archeia.com> wrote in message 
news:rcaicd$ifh$1@gioia.aioe.org...
...
> According to 10.2.1 it should be possible:
>
>   is important that programs be able to declare data structures that
> are link-time initialized with aggregates, string_literals, and
> concatenations thereof. etc.
>
> Even adding pragma Preelaborable_Initialization (x) for each of the
> types, doesn't do anything.

The requirement in the Ada Standard is that one should preelaborate data if 
the containing package is preelaborated. There's no requirement otherwise, 
and since it is an annex C requirement, it is not required of all Ada 
compilers. Janus/Ada, for instance, has no concept of an initialized but 
modifiable data segment so it can't do precisely what you want. (It does put 
aggregates into such a segment, but it will copy them if they are used to 
initialize variables.) We did that to match the RAM/ROM split of many 
embedded systems.

Anyway, I would expect a compiler to do it if it is possible. But it very 
often isn't possible for one reason or another (for instance, static 
aggregates often are *way* bigger than dynamic initialization, so for a 
compiler that tries to minimize memory usage, static initialization may not 
be a good idea in some cases).

The better question is why you care? One ought to be concerned about whether 
performance is good enough for your application, and it's highly unlikely 
that the load time would have any impact on that whatsoever. (And as 
previously noted, static initialization can require more work to load a 
program.) On a desktop, antivirus overhead is way more than any sort of load 
cost/saving from the memory layout. (The situation can be different on a 
bare machine, of course.)

                                       Randy.