[PATCH] Speed up ld by about 5 times on Windows.

[Nick Clifton]

Hi Sonal,

> I have attached an updated patch for ldlang.c (against revision 1.226). 
> I have tried to follow GNU coding standards in my changes. Please review 
> my changes.

Thanks for submitting this patch.  I am looking at it now, but I have 
encountered a problem.  It appears that the patch breaks a couple of 
tests in the linker testsuite, at least for ELF based toolchains:

   Running 
/work/sources/binutils/current/ld/testsuite/ld-scripts/sort.exp ...
   FAIL: SORT_BY_NAME(SORT_BY_NAME())
   FAIL: SORT_BY_NAME(SORT_BY_NAME()) --sort-section name

These tests are not run for PE based toolchains, including the mingw32 
toolchain, which may be why you did not encounter it in your own testing.

The tests are expecting the input sections to be sorted into this order:

   texta
   textb
   text1a
   text1b
   text2a
   text2b
   text3a
   text3b

But instead the (patched) linker is sorting them into this order:

   texta
   text1a
   text2a
   text3a
   textb
   text1b
   text2b
   text3b

Perhaps you could look into this ?

Cheers
   Nick