> While it's true that archives are generated from the .o's, they are not treated as > static libraries. If they were, you could use ld as the linker instead of g++. As it > is now, g++ links every .a and .o together in one step. This negates the benefit of > using static libraries, and you might as well be linking every .o and not have .a's > at all. If you try to use ld to link MAME, you will realize that there are dependency > cycles in the .a's and they can't actually be used as static libraries. This means > that build systems like NDK (android) which depend on linking code with ld can't > handle MAME's current architecture.
Ok, that's fair, and you'd gain some better parallelism in the build as well. Do send in these changes once you've gotten them to work with latest.
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