In the standard there is a notion of "significant prefix length". ie, your symbol names may actually be truncated. In C89 the minimum guaranteed length for expo

In the standard there is a notion of "significant prefix length". ie, your symbol names may actually be truncated. In C89 the minimum guaranteed length for exported symbols was 6 (IIRC) which explains why the libc symbols are so terse. Adding underscores would greatly reduce the number of significant characters (of course, all of this is mostly obsolete these days).