Thanks for working on this.

I tried building the project I was experimenting with (FontForge), but tcc segfaults while compiling one of the files.

However, this is a large, complex project. I suspect it would be better to test it on something smaller first.

I'm sorry that I don't have either the expertise (I don't know much about linkers) or time to investigate further at present.

I did also try building a smaller project (psutils), and that worked fine, but I don't think it needs --whole-archive support. I am not sure what a minimal test would be.

I resurrected the patch supplied to the mailing list in 2009:

https://www.mail-archive.com/tinycc-devel@nongnu.org/msg02367.html

I fixed it up to build with git head, built it and tested it. It runs fine to build binaries with an autotools build system configured with

CC=tcc ./configure

but the resultant binary comes up with an "undefined symbol" error in one of the libraries in the project. I also had to add support for -rdynamic to libtool to get the build to work, so it's possible the problem lies here and not in --whole-archive. In particular, the undefined symbol in question is not from an object that was linked with --whole-archive.

Hence, since --whole-archive is a useful flag to get tcc working with autotools, and of course in its own right, I suggest you have a look at the patch and see if it is acceptable. I cannot see any suggestion that it was actively rejected last time round, just no evidence that it was ever added.