Re: [2.6 patch] drivers/net/smc-mca.c: cleanups

[Willy Tarreau <willy@w.ods.org>]

On Sat, Feb 19, 2005 at 10:09:00AM +0100, Arjan van de Ven wrote:
> On Sat, 2005-02-19 at 03:41 -0500, Jeff Garzik wrote:
> > Adrian Bunk wrote:
> > > This patch contains the following cleanups:
> > > - make a needlessly global function static
> > > - make three needlessly global structs static
> > > 
> > > Since after moving the now-static stucts to smc-mca.c the file smc-mca.h 
> > > was empty except for two #define's, I've also killed the rest of 
> > > smc-mca.h .
> > 
> > It looks like the structs should be 'static const', not just 'static'.
> > 
> > This comment is applicable to similar changes, also.  Use 'const' 
> > whenever possible.
> 
> does that even have meaning in C? In C++ it does, but afaik in C it
> doesn't.

Yes it does. Often the variables declared this way will go into the text
section which is marked read-only. I've used this technique in a few very
small programs to reduce their size (I could strip off both their bss and
data sections to save space). Also, I believe that the compiler is able
to optimize code using consts, but this is pure speculation, I've not
verified it.

Willy