[swift-dev] Requiring gold linker for Linux targets?

[William Dillon]

I'm in favor.  The current disparate use of linkers overly complicates the build scripts, and given that BFD seems to be a liability, I think it makes sense to transition.  In the interest of full disclosure, I don't fully understand all the implications of this change, especially on x86.

- Will

> On May 13, 2016, at 6:50 PM, Saleem Abdulrasool via swift-dev <swift-dev at swift.org> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> On ARM targets, gold is already required due to a certain bugs in the handling of relocations for those targets.
> 
> For other targets, there was a bug exposed in the BFD linker (which is believed to have been fixed in a newer release).
> 
> Recently, another change seems to have exposed yet another issue with linking on x86 targets.
> 
> Given the frequency with which issues occurring with the BFD linker, is it reasonable to say that building swift requires the gold linker?  To the previous three issues, I believe that two of them were worked around with the approach of using gold.  So, there is some precedent to that approach.  Furthermore, this idea has been brought up before.
> 
> Im hoping that this can spark a thread which can come up to some conclusion to whether it is reasonable to expect that the linux builds would use gold for the foreseeable future.
> 
> -- 
> Saleem Abdulrasool
> compnerd (at) compnerd (dot) org
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