http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=52887
--- Comment #17 from David Edelsohn <dje at gcc dot gnu.org> 2012-06-20 13:25:31 UTC --- Another feature of AIX is its garbage-collecting linker. The very first implementation of GCC for AIX was forced to emit an extra symbol to tie the text section to the data section to prevent the linker from garbage collecting a related section that did not have an obvious reference. This introduces an extra dependency and may pull in unreferenced data sections from object files. libstdc++ is built with --function-sections and --data-sections, which should minimize this, but, again, if an application is relying upon the linker to ignore missing definitions of symbols, it may behave differently on AIX.