Linking glib with gld in Irix

[Magnus Bergman <magnus bergman observer net>]

I have problems building glib (2.6.6) in Irix using GCC, gas and gld
(no, I don't forget to use --with-gnu-ld). It fails then linking
glib-genmarshal against glib because some symbols, including g_malloc
cannot be found. Then I examine the glib library (using GNU objdump) I
see than most symbols are marked hidden, for example:

60017e80 l     F *ABS*  00000000 .hidden IA__g_malloc

While a few are not, for example:

600354bc g     F *ABS*  00000000 g_strcasecmp

I have no idea what that means. I guess it's the reason for the
failure, but why does it happen? Is it some feature that doesn't work
as expected on irix, or does it expect some irix feature not supported
by gld maybe?