id	summary	reporter	owner	description	type	status	priority	milestone	component	version	severity	resolution	keywords	cc
19	Reduce the number of exports in the Qt DLL	dmik	dmik	"Currently, the Qt DLL exports about 16500 symbols. This amount is quite large and will most likely keep increasing slightly with every new Qt release or a new missing feature added. It's not a problem by itself, but sticks us to a concrete version of the linker: IBM ILINK from the distributioin of IBM Visual Age C/C++ 3.08. The general problem with this linker is that it's not free so that you cannot use it unless you have a valid license of Visual Age C/C++, which is obviously not good for such an open source project the Qt library is. Possibly alternatives include:

 1. ILINK386 from the IBM OS/2 Developer's Toolkit. I haven't used it for Qt but heard that it has various problems related to linking the GCC code containing C++ classes.
 2. ILINK 5.0, freely distributed by IBM (?). Looks like the latest linker for OS/2 made by IBM, but has very strange limitation (seems like a bug actually): the total number of exports cannot exceed 15000 or so. If there are more exports, the DLL just screws up the application using it when the latter gets loaded by the kernel for execution.
 3. WCL386 from the Open Watcom compiler package. Currently, this linker is also not able to link the GCC's C++ code properly. Knut St Osmundsen (the current maintainer and the developer of the OS/2 version of GCC) is currently working on this issue, but we don't know anything yet about its limitation on the number of exports.

The last two can be freely used by anyone, so it would be great if they could be used to link the Qt DLL and Qt applications. Taking the limitations of ILINK 5.0 (and possible limitations of WCL386) into account, it's worth a try to reduce the number of exports in the Qt library."	task	assigned	normal	qt-os2-3.3.1-rc07	[general]		normal		DLL number of exports