[DVDnav-discuss] [RFC] Adding ELF visibility support?

[Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò]

I was wondering if people were interested in getting ELF visibility
support into libdvdnav. The idea of using ELF visibility is that
internal non-static functions can be hidden from the ELF, not exporting
them anymore to the users of the library. It's an ABI change (so the
soname should be changed), but then it allows you to change the ABI of
the internal functions without being concerned if that might break
frontends using internal symbols.

Hidden visibility also makes the library load faster and work faster too
(as the symbols don't need to be resolved at runtime), and avoids
interposing (symbols' collision).

And as an extra, you won't get symbol collisions between libdvdnav and
libdvdread when libdvdnav is built with the internal copy of libdvdread
(because the libdvdread-provided symbols wouldn't be exported).

If you want, I can prepare a patch to add tests and headers for hidden
visibility.

-- 
Diego "Flameeyes" Pettenò
http://farragut.flameeyes.is-a-geek.org/