[roqi]

> The problem being tackled here is link time in debug builds. This affects all platforms.

I've worked on many projects, big and small, and the link time of debug builds was never a problem that was worth fixing.

In fact, even today I was discussing with a coworker the inefficiencies of the project's build process, we literally commented that having to only link a huge subproject is a major blessing.

[compiler-guy]

For Google at least, link times are sufficiently important that the company has rewritten the linker from scratch twice--both open source. The Gnu-Gold linker which ships as part of gnu binutils and subsequently the ELF version of llvm's lld.

So although you might not encounter issues with link times (debug or otherwise), it is a multi-million dollar problem for big companies like Google and Apple. Both in resources and engineer time.

[roqi]

> So although you might not encounter issues with link times (debug or otherwise), it is a multi-million dollar problem for big companies like Google and Apple. Both in resources and engineer time.

I appreciate your appeal to authority, but I worked at a FANG on a project that had over 20 GB worth of static and dynamic/shared libraries.

Linking was never an issue.

[compiler-guy]

Err, "Google has rewritten the linker twice. Both times with the stated goal to make link times much faster." isn't an appeal to authority. It's evidence that the company has found speeding up linking to be worth millions of dollars. Otherwise it wouldn't have done it.

They surely weren't doing it for fun.

[roqi]

> Err, "Google has rewritten the linker twice. Both times with the stated goal to make link times much faster." isn't an appeal to authority.

It is, and a very weak one considering Google has a history of getting people to work on promotion-oriented projects.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31261488

> It's evidence that the company has found speeding up linking to be worth millions of dollars.

It really isn't. You're buying into the fallacy that a FANG can never do wrong and all their developers are infallible and walk on water. All you're able to say is google did this and google did that, and you're telling that to a guy who has first-hand experience on how this and that is actually made. You never mentioned any technical aspect or more importantly performance differences. You only name-dropped Google, and to a guy who already worked at a FANG.

Linking was never an issue.

[compiler-guy]

Want to throw out the technical aspects and performance differences. Judge for yourself:

On initial contribution to the gnu binutils project, the Google developer for Gold claimed a 5x speed improvement: https://sourceware.org/pipermail/binutils/2008-March/055660....

In a public talk on llvm lld, the Google developer for LLD claimed another 5x speed improvement:

https://llvm.org/devmtg/2017-10/slides/Ueyama-lld.pdf

[KerrAvon]

There are many FAANG customers who care about link time; some of them are also FAANGs, but certainly not all. You're falling into the libertarian trap of thinking that because it didn't happen in your experience, it could not possibly happen to anyone.

[duped]

If you had 20GB of dynamic and static libraries as a part of your build the only thing that can be a bottleneck is linking