On Thu, Apr 29, 2010 at 10:57 AM, Richard Guenther <richard.guent...@gmail.com> wrote: > Yes - that would be basically a linker plugin without plugin support. > And I'd go even further and have LD provide a complete symbol > resolution set like we get from the gold linker-plugin. > > That wouldn't help for old or non-gnu LDs of course.
Right. The way this seems to be going, we're looking at LTO support for archives only for targets where GNU binutils is used. But what are the alternatives? You have to somehow know what symbols you want to extract from an archive, without implementing ld again. What would be helpful, is when things get set up in such a way that binutils ld is just one tool that can give you this resolution file, but leave the option open to call another tool. That would allow us to write a special tool for targets without binutils. I'm thinking of course of my latest pet project, LTO for Mach-O. There is no working Mach-O linker in binutils (or at least it's not the standard ld) but it may be possible to just write a separate tool for Mach-O that generates the resolution file. Users would still need to install the extra tool, but at least it would be possible to make things work. Ciao! Steven
