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Re: Fwd: Link-Time Optimizations
Thank you for your answer. I didn't know nothing about these barriers.
But it seems that the future looks promising.
Where can I find information about these projects?
Javi
2005/11/8, James E Wilson <wilson@specifix.com>:
> On Tue, 2005-11-08 at 00:18, Javier Cabezas Rodríguez 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
>
>