WHOPR bootstrap, when/how?

[Basile Starynkevitch]

On Thu, Apr 08, 2010 at 09:13:45AM -0400, Diego Novillo wrote:
> 
> Perhaps the easiest option is to remove the feature.  WHOPR does not
> represent a lot of code over the basic LTO framework, so this should
> be relatively easy and non-intrusive.

> 
> The first target I would shoot for, however, is to replace -combine with -flto.

I am bit confused by this last sentence. Isn't it already the case in
gcc 4.5 that using -flto both at compile and at link times (usually a
trivial way to do that might be "make CC='gcc-4.5 -flto -O2'" or
something similar) is practically enough to replace the -combine flag?

In other words, what are the real reasons to keep -combine in gcc 4.5?
I feel it is becoming a deprecated feature.... (of course, it seems
that the major difference is that -combine makes most name becoming
local symbols, while -flto keeps all global names as global symbols
from the linking point of view).

So what are the real use cases of -combine not covered by -flto ?

Cheers

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