https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=65150
--- Comment #12 from Jan Hubicka <hubicka at gcc dot gnu.org> --- The functions ought to be equivalent, so transfering just some users should not cause correctness issues. Of course unless the function is turned into a thunk and/or the rest of references are optimized out, we will not see code size decrease. In longer term I would like to get references redirected, but doing so is bit more touchy than redirecting callers. ipa-visibility already has code to bring in static variable initializers and update them. It probably should be separated and also used by ipa-icf. Redirecting references in function bodies will need new infrastructure. This is not that important issue as it may look, because in most cases we will not redirect references because we lack knowledge about ADDR_EXPR being posisbly used for pointer comparsion. For GCC 5 I guess we may want to do redirection only when symbol passes will_be_removed_from_program_if_no_direct_calls_p or when we are going to turn the function into thunk anyway. For GCC 6 we can introduce analysis to identify symbols whose address can possibly be compared for equality. Given the rising number of cases where this matter, I think doing so will be a win.
