Re:New ELF Linker from the LLVM Project
by ithkuil on Tuesday December 01, 2015 @04:56AM
(#10654426)
While the gold linker is now part of the GNU binutils distribution, it's speed advantaged stem exactly from what you mentioned. The origin question is how lld can improve on that even further. Is there any document such as http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.co... for gold ?
"Unlike the GNU linker, gold doesn't use the BFD library to process object files. While this limits supported formats to ELF only, it's also claimed to result in a cleaner and faster implementation without an additional abstraction layer. Complete removal of BFD was cited as a reason to create a new linker from scratch rather than incrementally improve the GNU linker.[5]"
"Unlike the GNU linker, gold doesn't use the BFD library to process object files. While this limits supported formats to ELF only, it's also claimed to result in a cleaner and faster implementation without an additional abstraction layer. Complete removal of BFD was cited as a reason to create a new linker from scratch rather than incrementally improve the GNU linker.[5]"
-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_(linker)
"Gold is known to work on x86 and x86-64, PowerPC (partially) and ARM."
-- https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/GoldLinking