> > > > Your patch means that Andis/HJs work is no longer needed and we can > > drop the section suffixes again? > > > > > > There is a difference between "ld -r " and "gcc -r". "ld -r" may not > perform any LTO.
Theoretically ld -r may look up for the linker plugin on it search path that will in turn execute GCC to link the IL. It is not implemented though. I am not proposing to drop the section based incremental linking code however. In fact I never paid too much attention to incremental linking. What are the main use cases? I know some build systems use it to reduce final linking time. What are the other uses? It is out of scope of this patch, but eventually it would be nice to teach LTO optimizers to work incrementally: it is perfectly possible for optimizers to do their execute methods just not do any decisions that need whole program (i.e. inlining when size increases) and apply the changes to IL/re-earlyoptimize changed functions and stream. Honza > > -- > H.J.
