I'm trying to build with libbfd on MacOS. I haven't found anything that indicates that Apple Clang would provide anything similar so I'm "stuck" on Homebrew.
Linking with /usr/local/opt/binutils/lib/libbfd.a I get a lot of unresolved symbols, some detective work showed that some at least came from libiberty so thanks to https://stackoverflow.com/a/65978315/204658 I resolved most of them, but I still have a few which are also a bit confusing:
Undefined symbols for architecture x86_64:
"_compress", referenced from:
_bfd_compress_section_contents in libbfd.a(compress.o)
(maybe you meant: __bfd_pex64_print_ce_compressed_pdata, __bfd_pep_print_ce_compressed_pdata , _bfd_init_section_compress_status , _bfd_is_section_compressed , _bfd_is_section_compressed_with_header , __bfd_pe_print_ce_compressed_pdata , _bfd_compress_section , _bfd_get_compression_header_size , _bfd_update_compression_header , _bfd_check_compression_header )
"_compressBound", referenced from:
_bfd_compress_section_contents in libbfd.a(compress.o)
"_inflate", referenced from:
_decompress_contents in libbfd.a(compress.o)
"_inflateEnd", referenced from:
_decompress_contents in libbfd.a(compress.o)
"_inflateInit_", referenced from:
_decompress_contents in libbfd.a(compress.o)
"_inflateReset", referenced from:
_decompress_contents in libbfd.a(compress.o)
Those symbols are from the libz library.
On many platforms you don't need to explicitly link with libz, but on Homebrew you do.
You need to link using -libz.