Incremental ld/ar/ranlib/whatever
==================================

  This package contains:

  - incremental "ar", a fast and incremental library builder

  - the rudiments of a linker which ultimately wants to link
    incrementally

  - a few additional tools: ranlib, size, ldd, elfdump

  At this time, the programs are specific to ELF/i386.


  The librarian, "iar" is stable enough that I have it in daily
  production use, and it is noticeably faster than GNU ar, although
  that's hard to measure these days. On my 2 GHz / 1 GB machine, it is
  about three times faster (rebuilding libc.a from scratch, >1200 .o
  files: iar 0.09 seconds, ar 0.25 seconds). Previous figures taken on
  a 200 MHz / 32 MB machine show 2:42 min vs. 1:13 min (and 24 MB vs 3
  MB memory usage) for rebuilding libHSstd.a, and 0:18 min (19 MB) vs. 
  0:04 min (1 MB) for listing its contents.

  The linker only has rudiments so far. It can link "hello world", and
  I recall that I've used it to link itself statically, but it's far
  from being usable.


Compiling
----------

  You need a C++ compiler and a Linux/i386 machine.

  Get the "cpluslib-YYYYMMDD.tar.gz", unzip it into this directory (so
  you get a new directory "cpluslib"). Check the makefile. Build it by
  invoking 'make'.

  Build the linker etc. by invoking 'make' in the root directory
  (check the makefile first to invoke the correct compiler).


Notes
------

  I have not done anything to the linker since 2003.

  I have now (2007) updated the code to build with a recent C++
  compiler, g++-3.3 in this case, and completed the 'ildd' (that was
  easy :-).


Documentation
--------------

  Man pages are in doc/.


Author
-------

  Stefan Reuther

  Email: streu@gmx.de

  WWW: http://phost.de/~stefan/ild/
