Ok, so I've just pushed my changes to master. TLDR: If your distro is not older than 2-3 years, you can probably just pass --enable-split-debug --enable-gdb-index --enable-ld=gold to configure and you'll just magically get faster builds taking less space and faster gdb startup. I've decided not to enable the options by default for now, just to see if something breaks. I still plan to do that later, if nothing shows up. Note that this is meant primarily for debug builds. It should work also for release builds, but I have no idea what it will do e.g. with distro packaging tools that generate debuginfo packages. If you want to see numbers, see previous mails, nothing has really changed there (except for lld below). I've changed --enable-gold to --enable-ld=<linker>, because I've found out that LLVM besides Clang provides also a linker called lld, and lld at least in version 6 actually performs even better than gold (4s vs gold's 6-7s). There are some caveats though: * lld6 crashes sometimes and needs [1] (openSUSE users, devel:tools:compiler/libLLVM6 has it) * Valgrind can't handle lld's debuginfo and needs [2] and [3], or passing --no-rosegment to lld, see https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=384727 (openSUSE users, home:llunak:my/valgrind has them) [1] https://github.com/llvm-mirror/llvm/commit/d227a3b47ef9e57d86127c7a94b4d06fdf1bfd2d [2] https://github.com/orivej/valgrind/commit/c59bf5c215f85fb08605708b51f88777227885ae.patch [3] https://bugsfiles.kde.org/attachment.cgi?id=113765 -- LuboÅ¡ LuÅ?ák l.lunak at collabora.com