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Re: Fwd: Link-Time Optimizations
On Tue, 2005-11-08 at 00:18, Javier Cabezas RodrÃguez wrote:
> Why don't implement this functionality in the GNU Toolchain?
There have been some historical political barriers. The FSF is so
concerned about people abusing the GPL with respect to GCC that they
have placed restrictions on gcc development. For a long time, gcc was
forbidden to have any feature that involved writing data to files and
then reading it back in, because this might have allowed people to use
proprietary code with gcc. Without this feature, we could not implement
link-time optimizations/inter-procedural optimizations of the kind that
you are looking for. My understanding is that this restriction was
finally lifted this year, and now people are starting to look at the
problem. There are so many active projects at the moment though that it
will probably be awhile before anything interesting happens in this
area.
By the way, this was implemented once about 15 years ago, by the Intel
GNU i960 compiler team in Oregon. They had inter-module function
inlining working, but probably not much else. Unfortunately, Intel
never donated the code to the FSF. Also, unfortunately, the FSF never
would have accepted the code at the time because of the above political
issue.
--
Jim Wilson, GNU Tools Support, http://www.specifix.com