Re: [0/21] Add support for AIX 6

[Ian Lance Taylor <iant@google.com>]

Richard Sandiford <richards@transitive.com> writes:

> Now the AIX linker appears to apply something like --whole-archive
> semantics to _all_ archives.

That is correct.  The AIX linker uses the equivalent of --whole-archive,
and then uses garbage collection to discarded unreferenced csects.

My attitude when I did the original GNU ld port to AIX was that GNU ld
should, as much as possible, present the same interface on every host.
I figured that the main reason that people would use GNU ld for AIX
would be because they were cross-compiling to AIX, and that the most
likely scenario there was a program which ran on many different hosts.
I felt that it would be more convenient in that scenario if they did not
have to invoke the linker differently on different hosts.  This shows up
most drastically on AIX, but we also see it in, e.g., the default for
--export-dynamic, which is different in the native linkers on Solaris
and System V, but which is always the same for GNU ld.

I don't feel all that strongly about this then or now, but that was my
reasoning and it still seems valid to me.

Ian