[LLVMdev] LLD improvement plan

[Rafael Espíndola]

> Speaking of the performance, if I want to make a significant difference, I'd
> focus on introducing new symbol resolution semantics. Especially, the Unix
> linker semantics is pretty bad for performance because we have to visit
> files one by one serially and possibly repeatedly. It's not only bad for
> parallelism but also for a single-thread case because it increase size of
> data to be processed. This is I believe the true bottleneck of Unix linkers.
> Tackling that problem seems to be most important to me, and "ELF as a file
> format is slow" is still an unproved thing to me.

It is more than unproven. It is proven wrong.

Short of your new COFF linker, gold is ELF only and the fastest linker around.

We have a badly designed ELF linker. That is hardly ELF's fault.

Cheers,
Rafael