The new product version is said to deliver on the promise of program size reduction, achieving a 5-12% reduction over the previous version on typical applications, and even higher gains compared to conventional GCC tool chains. These savings are the result of the new LTO, combined with SEGGER’s Linker and Run-time library emLib-C. Through LTO, it is possible to optimise the entire application, opening the door for optimisation opportunities that are simply not available to the compiler.
The Linker adds features such as compression of initialised data and deduplication, as well as the flexibility of dealing with fragmented memory maps that embedded developers have to cope with. Like all SEGGER software, it is written from scratch for use in deeply embedded computing systems. Additionally, the size required by the included runtime library is said to be slower than that of runtime libraries used by most GCC tool chains.
