On Sun, 24 Mar 2024, 18:01 Yuri Kanivetsky via Gcc, <gcc@gcc.gnu.org> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> It looks like somewhere between gcc-5.3.0 and gcc-6.2.1 --as-needed
> became the default:
>
> https://gist.github.com/x-yuri/1b4c19891be50b2b8801689de1487009
>
> In other words it looks like on Alpine Linux 3.4 -lintl always adds
> libintl, on >= 3.5 only if some of its symbols are really needed.
>
> Can you possibly give a link to the commit or a changelog entry?
>

That's a linker option, and the linker is not part of GCC. Any change in
linker behaviour is not because of a change in GCC.

The GNU linker can be configured to default to --as-needed or not, and
different distros use different defaults.