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Re: [0/21] Add support for AIX 6
Ian Lance Taylor <iant@google.com> writes:
> Richard Sandiford <richards@transitive.com> writes:
>> Now the AIX linker appears to apply something like --whole-archive
>> semantics to _all_ archives.
>
> That is correct. The AIX linker uses the equivalent of --whole-archive,
> and then uses garbage collection to discarded unreferenced csects.
>
> My attitude when I did the original GNU ld port to AIX was that GNU ld
> should, as much as possible, present the same interface on every host.
> I figured that the main reason that people would use GNU ld for AIX
> would be because they were cross-compiling to AIX, and that the most
> likely scenario there was a program which ran on many different hosts.
> I felt that it would be more convenient in that scenario if they did not
> have to invoke the linker differently on different hosts. This shows up
> most drastically on AIX, but we also see it in, e.g., the default for
> --export-dynamic, which is different in the native linkers on Solaris
> and System V, but which is always the same for GNU ld.
>
> I don't feel all that strongly about this then or now, but that was my
> reasoning and it still seems valid to me.
Me too FWIW. The only time this caused us trouble in practice was in
a makefile that (when expanded) used the equivalent of "gcc -lpthread".
It was easy to convince folks that "gcc -pthread" was a better idea
anyway, since it sets the appropriate preprocessor macros and picks
the right gcc multilibs.
Richard