Re: -flto to become more of a routine - any change in opinion since 2011?
Steffen Möller wrote:
> I admit to be a fan of link time optimisation and would like to see this
> challenge promoted towards more of a routine challenge to establish for
> our packages. I found this informative thread
>
> https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2011/06/msg00181.html
>
> that in particular sees the challenge for the buildds to cope with the
> additional demands on compute time and/or memory. With a couple of
> compiler versions down the road I still see no conceptional difference,
> except that possibly the build demons may have become more powerful
> compared with the average package size, especially so for the often
> embedded architectures.
One thing has changed since then: GCC supports "slim" LTO objects, which
*don't* compile the code twice. A "fat" LTO object file contains both
intermediate representation and generated machine code, and you can
decide at link time to not use an LTO linker; a "slim" object contains
only intermediate representation, and can only be linked with LTO.
Using slim objects provides a significant reduction in build time.
- Josh Triplett
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