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Mailing lists / fpc-devel / 2010-08

Internal linker question

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Graeme Geldenhuys

Hi,

[...just curious...]

As far as I understand, the Windows version of FPC has an internal linker which greatly improved the speed of building/linking software on that platform.

Why doesn't the Linux version of FPC (or any other platform for that matter) have it's own internal linker? Is it simply because nobody wrote it yet, or is there some other technical reason for not doing it?

Regards,
- Graeme -

fpGUI Toolkit - a cross-platform GUI toolkit using Free Pascal http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/

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Florian Klaempfl
to Graeme Geldenhuys
Graeme Geldenhuys wrote 6 lines
Hi, [...just curious...] As far as I understand, the Windows version of FPC has an internal linker which greatly improved the speed of building/linking software on that platform.

Yes.

Why doesn't the Linux version of FPC (or any other platform for that matter) have it's own internal linker? Is it simply because nobody wrote it yet,

Because nobody wrote one yet. But: the gnu elf linker is faster than the gnu windows coff linker so the gain and motiviation is less to write an internal elf linker.

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Jeppe Johansen
to Graeme Geldenhuys: [...just curious...] As far as I understand, the Windows version of FPC has an internal…
Graeme Geldenhuys wrote
Why doesn't the Linux version of FPC (or any other platform for that matter) have it's own internal linker? Is it simply because nobody wrote it yet, or is there some other technical reason for not doing it?

I have made part of an ELF internal linker.

The main hurdle is to understand how dynamic linking works. Static linking is "easy" enough

Here's the old code, if anybody is interested. I haven't checked if it can patch any longer, and there might be some old arm stuff there too: http://j-software.dk/elf.patch.txt

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Jonas Maebe
to Florian Klaempfl: Yes. Because nobody wrote one yet. But: the gnu elf linker is faster than the gnu windows…
Florian Klaempfl wrote 5 lines
Because nobody wrote one yet. But: the gnu elf linker is faster than the gnu windows coff linker so the gain and motiviation is less to write an internal elf linker.

The GNU binutils also have a (relatively) new ELF x86 linker (gold) these days that is supposedly much faster than ld. I don't know whether anyone already tried whether it works with FPC though.

Jonas

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David W Noon
to Jonas Maebe

On Thu, 12 Aug 2010 10:59:45 +0200, Jonas Maebe wrote about Re: [fpc-devel] Internal linker question:

Show quoted text 12 lines
On 12 Aug 2010, at 09:20, Florian Klaempfl wrote: > Because nobody wrote one yet. But: the gnu elf linker is faster > than the > gnu windows coff linker so the gain and motiviation is less to > write an > internal elf linker. The GNU binutils also have a (relatively) new ELF x86 linker (gold) these days that is supposedly much faster than ld. I don't know whether anyone already tried whether it works with FPC though.

Like most other Gentoo users, I installed the "gold" linker a couple of years ago. It totally trashed every binary it produced. It was dropped from binutils about 6 months later, at least for Gentoo-supplied binutils.

Regards, Dave [RLU #314465] ======================================================================= (David W Noon) =======================================================================

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Sven Barth
to Graeme Geldenhuys: [...just curious...] As far as I understand, the Windows version of FPC has an internal…
Graeme Geldenhuys wrote 10 lines
Hi, [...just curious...] As far as I understand, the Windows version of FPC has an internal linker which greatly improved the speed of building/linking software on that platform. Why doesn't the Linux version of FPC (or any other platform for that matter) have it's own internal linker? Is it simply because nobody wrote it yet, or is there some other technical reason for not doing it?

Isn't there already a prototype ELF linker in the compiler? Or is that only a skeleton like the OS/2 one?

Regards,
Sven

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