[swift-dev] [RFC] Moving to gold linker

[William Dillon]

Hi All,

Orlando (included in the to line) and I have been looking at using the gold linker in the swift toolchain.  Orlando is really the lead on this project, I’m mostly just doing the plumbing.

The open questions I have are the following:

1. Is moving to or supporting Gold within the swift toolchain (not building swift itself) a goal, non-goal, or not desired?

2. Should the swift toolchain support the selection of linkers on the command line, and if so, what’s the default?

3. If a command-line switch for swift is not desired, should a switch in the build process select the supported linker?

4. Can it be assumed that gold will exist in user installations?

For some additional context, we’re investigating the use of gold because on armv6/v7 and aarch64 platforms the standard linker has bugs that require the "big hammer,” as Dmitri called it, of -Bsymbolic to work around them.  It would be nice to solve these issues a better way.

Thoughts, Ideas, Flames, etc?
- Will