Are there any caveats about optimizing a DLL that wouldn't appear in a EXE?

Question

I am generally familiar with the sorts of optimizations performed by the -O2 or -O3 switches.

I have been bitten a couple of times now by issues that are specific to building a DLL that don't appear in writing a flat executable, so before I start turning on optimizations are there any "gotcha"s that I should be aware of?

[Look here](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2722302/can-compiler-optimization-introduce-bugs) — sternr, Aug 23 '11 at 14:49
@sternr Thanks for the link, clearly optimizations can introduce bugs. I was looking for an idea about common issues that could occur with DLLs that might not be intuitive or produce hard to diagnose problems. — Stephen, Aug 23 '11 at 14:52

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 23 '11 at 15:07

2

Dead code elimination in an EXE basically starts with main as the single root of reachability, but every exported function of a DLL is a separate root.

answered Aug 23 '11 at 15:07

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Are there any caveats about optimizing a DLL that wouldn't appear in a EXE?

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