[cfe-dev] too slow to build clang

[Brooks Davis]

On Mon, Jan 19, 2009 at 07:47:25PM +0000, David Chisnall wrote:
> On 19 Jan 2009, at 19:40, Rick Mann wrote:
> 
> >
> > On Jan 19, 2009, at 10:50:16, Eric Christopher wrote:
> >
> >> Only on linux at this point.
> >
> >
> > In more seriousness, what would it take to run gold on Mac OS X?
> 
> Major and invasive changes to the OS X loader.  Gold is fast because  
> it only supports one binary format, ELF, while the older GNU ld  
> supports a.out, ELF and COFF.  OS X uses Mach-O, and is not supported  
> by either.
> 
> I don't know how Gold compares in terms of performance to the NeXT /  
> Apple linker, but I'd be surprised if there was a big difference in  
> performance since the Apple linker hasn't inherited the same level of  
> cruft as the GNU linker from having multiple binary formats added over  
> time.
> 
> Porting Gold to *BSD should be relatively easy, but no one appears to  
> have both the skill and the motivation to do so.

If Google hadn't signed to copyright over to the FSF and/or had released
to code under a BSDL or similar license, there would probably be quite
a bit of interest.  At things stand, the BSD projects are trying to
delay or avoid entirely the day when they have to use a GPLv3 licensed
binutils.  Yet another elf linker is probably more likely. :(

-- Brooks
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