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From: jayaram@sun602.uucp (Jayaram Kalpathy)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c++
Subject: Re: What does "munch" in C++ and/or Concurrent C do?
Message-ID: <705@cirrusl.UUCP>
Date: 30 Mar 89 18:36:17 GMT
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Reply-To: jayaram@sun602.UUCP (Jayaram Kalpathy)
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If I remember correctly, munch is the part that goes through all the .o's
that are being loaded, finds out what global classes are declared that
need to have constructors called and then sticks in the code that invokes
these constructors before `main'.

It does slow down the compile terribly. At Data General, we had a version of
the C++ compiler that built up a list of all these constructors into a
function called, say, foo_file_x() for the file file_x.o so that all you
had to do at link time was to make the stuff in _main call all these
functions.

One problem that AT&T C++ V1.2 had was that if you had global class
variables defined in a file that had only variables and NO CODE, the
constructors for these would not get called since the .o was never
linked in !!!