How to debug GCC/LD linking process for STL/C++

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I'm working on a bare-metal cortex-M3 in C++ for fun and profit. I use the STL library as I needed some containers. I thought that by simply providing my allocator it wouldn't add much code to the final binary, since you get only what you use.

I actually didn't even expect any linking process at all with the STL (giving my allocator), as I thought it was all template code.

I am compiling with -fno-exception by the way.

Unfortunately, about 600KB or more are added to my binary. I looked up what symbols are included in the final binary with nm and it seemed a joke to me. The list is so long I won't try and past it. Although there are some weak symbols.

I also looked in the .map file generated by the linker and I even found the scanf symbols

.text
0x000158bc       0x30   /CodeSourcery/Sourcery_CodeBench_Lite_for_ARM_GNU_Linux/bin/../arm-none-linux-gnueabi/libc/usr/lib/libc.a(sscanf.o)
0x000158bc                __sscanf
0x000158bc                sscanf
0x000158bc                _IO_sscanf

And:

$ arm-none-linux-gnueabi-nm binary | grep scanf
000158bc T _IO_sscanf
0003e5f4 T _IO_vfscanf
0003e5f4 T _IO_vfscanf_internal
000164a8 T _IO_vsscanf
00046814 T ___vfscanf
000158bc T __sscanf
00046814 T __vfscanf
000164a8 W __vsscanf
000158bc T sscanf
00046814 W vfscanf
000164a8 W vsscanf

How can I debug this? For first I wanted to understand what exactly GCC is using for linking (I'm linking through GCC). I know that if symbol is found in a text segment, the whole segment is used, but still that's too much.

Any suggestion on how to tackle this would really be appreciated.

Thanks

2 Answers
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