Lld - the llvm linker

When this was submitted 11 hours ago[0], amboar[1] commented[2]

    I found the design page[3] to be interesting reading

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6157338

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=amboar

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6157776

[3] http://lld.llvm.org/design.html

This is pretty much the last piece in the LLVM "puzzle", they've been relying on the GNU linker up until recently, which has made some optimisations more difficult to implement (notably whole program analysis targeting specific architectures)

"It can currently self host on Linux x86-64 with -static."

Does that mean we can finally build true, 100% static binaries? I dream of being able to scp-and-run on an arbitrary Linux machine.

To the developers: I'd strongly recommend reviewing the Solaris Linkers and Libraries Guide in your quest to create a new linker:

http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E26502_01/html/E26507/index.html

There are loads of generally useful technical details about ELF and linking in general that apply to almost any UNIX-like platform.

For example, full details of the System V Application Binary Interface (ELF):

http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E26502_01/html/E26507/glcfv.html#s...

Rod Evans and Ali Bahrami have decades of experience in this area and often added new functionality to the Solaris linker long before the GNU folks ever considered it.

Rod in particular has a very valuable set of posts with insight into linkers and related vagaries on his blog:

https://blogs.oracle.com/rie/

The Solaris linker was made to deal with crazy things like 4GB+ executables, multiple processor architectures, and hardware capabilities.

from the page:

"End-User Features: ... * Remove clang’s reliance on the system linker"

Very good news! full independency :) i was planning to embed clang in custom c/c++ compiler tools but the lack of a full linker library was odd, and in platforms where you dont know if theres a linker as in windows, it means you would have to distribute a vc redistributable with it, and rely on executing a batch operation for the linking process

Not to mention whatever optimizations that guys will be able to get their hands into in the linking process.

Nice work!

It still seems weirdly unix-centric to talk about "the system linker" as though all systems include development tools as a matter of course. I'm glad they are continuing to build all of the pieces they need for a truly independent toolchain.

People are still using SVN for new stuff?