From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98; Win 9x 4.90; Hotbar 3.0) Description of problem: Nowadays, linking and not compiler performance is the bottleneck in the development and test cycle. Incremental linking means that if you make a change in only 1 object file of an executable, the time to relink the executable will not be 10's of minutes for large software projects but only a few seconds, since only changed data and functions and references to them are updated in the executable. All the other object files are not relinked again. The gnu ld linker has no capability for incremental linking which is found in almost all other commercial linkers: Microsoft visual C++ linker, Sun ild (incremental ld) linker for the Forte IDE, HP also has an incremental linker. Here is a document with a description of how the HP-UX incremental linker works. It contains at the end references to other interesting docs about the subject http://www.usenix.org/events/osdi2000/wiess2000/full_papers/mikulin/mikulin.pdf View this as HTML: http://www.google.com/searchq=cache:xkjmZQf0O1YC:www.usenix.org/events/osdi2000/ wiess2000/full_papers/mikulin/mikulin.pdf+incremental+linking&hl=en Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.This is a request for enhancement and doesn't have steps to reproduce 2. 3. Additional info:
I would also like to add that incremental linking is a very important INFRASTRUCTURE technology that will benefit and boost the development of ALL large open source projects since it reduces the development and test cycle times considerably. This is why I think this should be a high priority bug sponsored by the companies that support linux such as Redhat or IBM (although I doubt IBM will support that since they have a good technology of incremental compilation and linking in their VisualAge c++ product - much better than HP's technology I mentioned above. Search at their website for more details). I don't think there is any other more important infrastracture technology that is missing in the GNU/Linux/Open source world than this.
Please file enhancement request to upstream bug database instead, though I don't see it much likely that anybody will work on it in the near future.