dmd's linking order

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Marco Leise" <Marco.Leise at gmx.de> wrote in message 
news:20120412074942.0c6bb2cd at marco-leise...
> Am Wed, 11 Apr 2012 14:51:14 -0400
> schrieb "Nick Sabalausky" <SeeWebsiteToContactMe at semitwist.com>:
>
>> "Steven Schveighoffer" <schveiguy at yahoo.com> wrote in message
>> news:op.wcln1rh9eav7ka at localhost.localdomain...
>> >
>> > I'm not a linker expert, but I found this page which describes the 
>> > changes
>> > and the reasoning:
>> >
>> > See this post: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NattyNarwhal/ToolchainTransition
>> >
>>
>> That says the order-dependent  behavior is caused by --as-needed being
>> default. I'm no linker expert either, but the description of the purpose
>> of --as-needed sounds...goofy and pointless (although maybe it makes 
>> sense
>> for C's lack of a proper module system?).
>>
>> It can be disabled, apperently, by using --no-as-needed. That page tries 
>> to
>> discourage people from doing that though, but the reason it gives seems
>> vague. Personally, I'd wonder whether going along with --as-needed is 
>> really
>> even worth doing. (Of course, if it turns out to be easy to fix the
>> ordering, then we may as well.)
>
> I didn't know that --as-needed causes so much trouble. We've been using it 
> on Gentoo a while before Ubuntu made that step and I know it took a while 
> (~a year) until all packages would compile with it.
> The problem that this solved was that libraries and applications are 
> linked to other libraries they don't actually call into. On a long stream 
> of dependencies an application would dynamically load way more libraries 
> than it actually uses, increasing the start time. So the linker lacked the 
> intelligence to filter out unnecessary libraries before.
> Since there are some cases, where you must link to a library anyway, you 
> can put --no-as-needed in front of them. Look at the positive side: You 
> can now by default link against all libraries on your system without 
> bloating the executable! :)
>

I was under the impression ld already stripped out unused symbols anyway?