Feature request : incremental linking

[niv twig]

Hello,

Nowadays, linking and not compiler performance is the bottleneck in the
development and test cycle.
Incremental linking means that if you make a change in only 1 object file of
an executable,
the time to relink the executable will not be 10's of minutes for large
software projects but only a few seconds, since only changed data and
functions and references to them are updated in the executable. All the
other object files are not relinked again.

The gnu ld linker has no capability for incremental linking which is found
in almost all
other commercial linkers: Microsoft visual C++ linker, Sun ild (incremental
ld) linker for the Forte IDE, HP also has an incremental linker.

Here is a document with a description of the how the HP-UX incremental
linker works.
It contains at the end references to other interesting docs about the
subject

http://www.usenix.org/events/osdi2000/wiess2000/full_papers/mikulin/mikulin.
pdf
View this as HTML:
http://www.google.com/searchq=cache:xkjmZQf0O1YC:www.usenix.org/events/osdi2
000/wiess2000/full_papers/mikulin/mikulin.pdf+incremental+linking&hl=en