Steffen Möller wrote: > I admit to be a fan of link time optimisation and would like to see this > challenge promoted towards more of a routine challenge to establish for > our packages. I found this informative thread > > https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2011/06/msg00181.html > > that in particular sees the challenge for the buildds to cope with the > additional demands on compute time and/or memory. With a couple of > compiler versions down the road I still see no conceptional difference, > except that possibly the build demons may have become more powerful > compared with the average package size, especially so for the often > embedded architectures.
One thing has changed since then: GCC supports "slim" LTO objects, which *don't* compile the code twice. A "fat" LTO object file contains both intermediate representation and generated machine code, and you can decide at link time to not use an LTO linker; a "slim" object contains only intermediate representation, and can only be linked with LTO. Using slim objects provides a significant reduction in build time. - Josh Triplett
