plugin_utils lib size seems too large

[allejo]

For some reason, our libplugin_utils.a is coming out to be about 2M? Is that right? If so, where is the extra size coming from?

For example with SAMPLE_PLUGIN, when I link to plugin_utils I get a .so that's ~911K when it's not being linked, it comes out to ~35K. Shouldn't the compiler be optimizing out a lot more of that code?

[jwmelto]

.so is fundamentally different from .a. It's generally not a good idea to link .a libraries into .so libraries. Shared objects need to have position-indepdent code (-fPIC or -kPIC or some variant, depending on the compiler); .a objects don't routinely have this enabled.

Now, if the size of libplugin_utils.a is a concern, we might consider changing it to a .so so that one instance in memory can service all plugins (smaller runtime footprint)