RFC: Should the linker support '--fast' and if so, what should it do ?

[Nick Clifton]

Hi Jan,

>>     Attached is a proposed patch to implement "-O 0" as a command line option
>>     that disables merging.

> I'm not entirely happy with forcing people to change the -O uses they may have.
> But perhaps that's tolerable. A possible alternative might be to support -O- to
> have the effect of setting optimize_level to 0, while -O <number> would set it
> to <number>+1. Yet of course -O0 has widely known meaning ...
> 
> I'm also uncertain as to the two "high cost" optimizations that you now move to
> -O2. Are they really high cost?
> 
> The doc change may want to be a little less ELF-centric. Inserting "e.g." may
> already suffice to address that.
> 
> --help output could do with also stating the default.
> 
> Perhaps not for this patch, but the handling of -O could also do with some
> improvement. "-O --help", for example, better wouldn't do what it does now.

Actually these are all good ideas.  So here is a version 2 patch.

It does not change the linker's use of -O <N> where N is a positive integer
greater than zero.  But is does add "-O 0" to disable merging and "-O -" to
restore the linker's default behaviour.  (I doubt that this will ever be used
but it is always best to have a means of restoring the default).  In addition
"-O <text>" will now trigger an error from the linker.

What do you think ?

Cheers
   Nick

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