35 lines
1.8 KiB
Markdown
35 lines
1.8 KiB
Markdown
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# Linkers part 20
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This will be my last blog posting on linkers for the time being. Tomorrow my
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blog will return to its usual trivialities. People who are specifically
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interested in linker information are warned to stop reading with this post.
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I’ll close the series with a short update on gold, the new linker I’ve been
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working on. It currently (September 25, 2007) can create executables. It can
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not create shared libraries or relocateable objects. It has very limited
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support for linker scripts–enough to read `/usr/lib/libc.so` on a GNU/Linux
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system. It doesn’t have any interesting new features at this point. It only
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supports x86. The focus to date has been entirely on speed. It is written to be
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multi-threaded, but the threading support has not been hooked in yet.
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By way of example, when linking a 900M C++ executable, the GNU linker (version
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2.16.91 20060118 on an Ubuntu based system) took 700 seconds of user time, 24
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seconds of system time, and 16 minutes of wall time. gold took 7 seconds of
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user time, 3 seconds of system time, and 30 seconds of wall time. So while I
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can’t promise that it will stay as fast as all features are added, it’s in a
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pretty good position at the moment.
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I’m the main developer on gold, but I’m not the only person working on it. A
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few other people are also making improvements.
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The goal is to release gold as a free program, ideally as part of the GNU
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binutils. I want it to be more nearly feature complete before doing this,
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though. It needs to at least support `-shared` and `-r`. I doubt gold will ever
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support all of the features of the GNU linker. I doubt it will ever support the
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full GNU linker script language, although I do plan to support enough to link
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the Linux kernel.
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Future plans for gold, once it actually works, include incremental linking and
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more far-reaching speed improvements.
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