GNU Binutils 2.26: Linker Gets Experimental Garbage Collection, LLVM Plugin Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: GNU Binutils 2.26: Linker Gets Experimental Garbage Collection, LLVM Plugin Support

GNU Binutils 2.26 has been released as the first major release in more than one year since Binutils 2.25...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GNU-Binutils-2.26

[FireBurn]

Garbage connection --> Garbage collection

[milkylainen]

Garbage in --> Garbage out

Seriously though. The article means to explain that --gc-sections that has been available for ELF binaries (for quite some time), now is available for COFF and PE too?

[Brane215]

Why does linker need garbage collection ?

[Guest]

Why does linker need garbage collection ?

Symbols unreachable from main() and from initializations and public somelib.so functions can be removed. Unused private recursive functions/variables form loops that can be removed by garbage collection.

[carewolf]

Why does linker need garbage collection ?

Dead-code removal. A compiler often can't tell if a function is used outside of the object-file, so they can only do dead-code removal inside functions, not on entire functions, but the linker can.