Richard Guenther <richard.guent...@gmail.com> writes: > Well, we'd then need to re-architect the symbol merging and > LTO unit read-in to properly honor linking semantics (drop > a LTO unit from an archive if it doesn't resolve any unresolved > symbols). I don't know how easy that will be, but it shouldn't > be impossible at least.
Yes, as I understand it, it was the need to replicate linking semantics that led to the gold plugin framework in the first place. (There is nothing stopping anybody from adding the same plugin framework to GNU ld, by the way, it's just that nobody has done the work.) Of course all the linker semantics can be copied into the compiler. But it's moderately complex. If you go this route, note that different object file formats have different rules for when to include an object from an archive, so make the code flexible. E.g., in BFD, the code to select an object from an archive is completely different for COFF and for ELF. The Darwin linker supports a different plugin framework, by the way. As far as I know it would be possible to adapt lto-plugin for that framework. Ian
