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Is there an advantage to upgrading Binutils from 2.16.1 to 2.19? What for?

In PSPSDK (Homebrew), we use Binutils 2.16.1 to build and link to the code for the PlayStation Portable, however this release is becoming quite outdated (3 versions replaced it). The community and I have updated GCC and newlib to the latest stable versions, and everything seems to work with old binutils.

Will GCC improve code with binutils 2.19? What for? Will binutils 2.19 create better elf files and libraries than 2.16.1? Why?

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binutils 2.19 has a new ELF linker called gold , which is multi-threaded, written in modern C ++, and quite a bit faster than the regular ld linker. I am not sure, however, about the work involved in adapting it.

Also, good new versions are always a good idea. Of course, features and bug fixes were probably included. I think I would certainly try, and if something goes wrong, you can still come back.

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In general, you do not need to update binutils unless you encounter some bug fixed in a later version of binutils, or you need new features (such as linker linkers).

In particular, GCC code generation is largely independent of binutils (with the exception of constructs like __thread , which require a certain level of support from binutils).

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