Re: [cs] pipe infrastructure support

[Ian Lance Taylor <ian at wasabisystems dot com>]

"Zack Weinberg" <zack@codesourcery.com> writes:

> collect2 would become a subroutine of the gcc driver, presumably?  I
> like this idea, independent of your efforts for the compile server,
> but it seems to me like something that will take a fair amount of time
> and effort.  Whereas I have a present need for collect2 to work in a
> cross-compiler configuration with host=i386-mingw32 (i.e. I would like
> to see that functional in 3.4).

If your concern is exclusively a cross-compiler configuration, then
another approach is to get the GNU linker to do everything which
collect2 does.  (Then presumably mrs will want to turn the linker into
a library and link it into xgcc, but frankly a system on which
fork/exec is a noticeable percentage of link time needs a lot of work
done elsewhere first.)

At one time the GNU linker did do everything that collect2 did, and on
many platforms using the GNU linker meant that collect2 was not
needed.  Then for a while template handling was done in a way which
could not easily be handled by a linker.  But now the linker once
again handles templates at least on ELF systems, by using linkonce
sections.

So what does collect2 do that can not be done in the linker?

Ian