parallelizing ghc

[John Lato]

> From: Evan Laforge <qdunkan at gmail.com>
>
> On Wed, Jan 25, 2012 at 11:42 AM, Ryan Newton <rrnewton at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> package list for me. ?The time is going to be dominated by linking,
>>> which is single threaded anyway, so either way works.
>>
>> What is the state of incremental linkers? ?I thought those existed now.
>
> I think in some specific cases.  I've heard there's a microsoft one?
> It would be windows only of course.  Is anyone using that with ghc?
>
> gold is supposed to be multi-threaded and fast (don't know about
> incremental), but once again it's ELF-only.  I've heard a few people
> talking about gold with ghc, but I don't know what the results were.
>
> Unfortunately I'm on OS X, I don't know about any incremental or
> multithreaded linking here.

Neither do I.  On my older machine with 2GB RAM, builds are often
dominated by ld because it starts thrashing.  And not many linkers
target Mach-O.

I've been toying with building my own ld replacement.  I don't know
anything about linkers, but I'd say at least even odds that I can do
better than this.

John L.