
Gold: Google Releases New and Improved GCC Linker - luccastera
http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2008/04/gold-google-releases-new-and-improved.html
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pmjordan
That's pretty cool. I've worked on projects where the link stage would take
minutes, and therefore constitute most of the incremental build time, and it's
not like you can avoid it. Visual C++ has a special incremental linker, it
always surprised me that nothing similar ever hit the mainstream GNU
toolchain. It'll be interesting to see if this gains traction.

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henning
I'm just waiting for Google to start making their own motherboards, chipsets,
and CPU architectures. That seems to be the logical conclusion of their
tendency to respond to the uniquely demanding requirements of their mission by
creating new, improved infrastructure.

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tb
Nope, far from it, they're using the most commodity hardware infrastructure
they can find. Their whole system is built around cheap, widely-available
hardware. Even with the volumes they are using, they would not get production
high enough to compete with the commodity PC market on price.

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tfinniga
They are trying to get more efficient power supplies..
<http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/26/2039213>

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pibefision
how they monetize this? it ads adsense for every new executable? :)

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wmf
Some intern probably wrote a MapReduce job which discovered that Google
engineers collectively spend thousands of hours per year linking, so writing a
new linker can be justified as a cost savings. :-)

OTOH, <http://xkcd.com/303/>

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utnick
doesnt link linux. FAIL.

jk.. this is one of the better projects ive seen come out of google. 5 times
speed increase is huge for big apps. does anyone know if it was a 20% project?
hopefully this gets picked up and ported around so that it becomes a viable
alternative to the gcc linker.

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antirez
He doesn't fully realize that __he __is the only one (with the other writing
code for this project) that is really giving back something, not "Google".
This corporate thinking is sad.

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PieSquared
Although you may be partially right in this case, I think that people take on
this corporate-hating mentality too often (against Google, against Sun,
against Microsoft even!). Give credit where it's due - it's a pretty
impressive thing for a company to let its employee's spend 20% of their time
on their own interests, and then pay them for it.

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antirez
Credit to google for the openmindness, but 1) Google is doing this for its own
interests of course. 2) this does not change the fact that the main credit is
due to the guy that wrote the code that could have used his time to produce
something not useful for the external community.

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sohail
FINALLY! Now can someone please rewrite GCC? That is the ugliest piece of code
I've ever seen.

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ashu
Is it hindering innovation to that extent to justify the rewrite? Remember,
GCC is the one of the most fundamental pieces of software running the entire
OSS eco-system. It's internal beauty isn't so much important as it's utility
to this system.

~~~
wmf
Apparently GCC is crimping Apple's style enough to justify a rewrite, although
that may be due to licensing and lack of modularity more than ugly code.

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ibsulon
I wish I knew someone still running gentoo so I could see their weeping for
joy.

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bluelu
Another open source release by google which no one really needs. Is is it
really that important that the linking takes a few minutes less. There are
probably tons of interesting projects at google which they could release, but
they are too evil to do that, because they fear their competitors. Not like
yahoo and microsoft, which give much more back to the community then google.

