gold/README

   1 gold is an ELF linker.  It is intended to have complete support for
   2 ELF and to run as fast as possible on modern systems.
   3
   4 It is written in C++.  It is (intended to be) a GNU program, and
   5 therefore follows the GNU formatting standards as modified for C++.
   6 Source documents in order of precedence:
   7     http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/
   8     http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/libstdc++/17_intro/C++STYLE
   9     http://www.zembu.com/eng/procs/c++style.html
  10
  11 The linker is intended to have complete support for cross-compilation,
  12 which still supporting the normal case of native linking as fast as
  13 possible.  This makes the code more complex.
  14
  15 Many functions are actually templates whose parameter is the ELF file
  16 class (e.g., 32 bits or 64 bits).  The code is the same, but we don't
  17 want to pay the execution time cost of always using 64-bit integers if
  18 the target is 32 bits.