Discussion about merging Go frontend

[Joseph S. Myers]

On Mon, 25 Oct 2010, Mark Mitchell wrote:

> On 10/25/2010 10:34 PM, Frank Ch. Eigler wrote:
> 
> > By the way, is there some necessity in accomplishing this by means of
> > a linked library, as opposed to via a spawned objcopy process?

(elfcpp isn't a *linked* library; it's a C++ template library consisting 
entirely of headers, with no makefile code or .o or .a files.)

> Probably none in theory, but it certainly seems messy and likely to be
> slow in practice.  Is there a reason that this would be desirable?

Well, slow on hosts where process creation is slow (just like the separate 
gcc/cc1/as/collect2/ld/lto-wrapper/... processes).  The separate process 
design was probably based on process creation being fast - although 
separate processes do have security and potentially parallelism advantages 
over using libraries for everything.  (It probably wouldn't be hard to 
support linking more of the separate programs into one for hosts where 
this helps; cf. the past MVS discussions.)

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
joseph@codesourcery.com