When placed on a global variable, !associated tellsThis is an ELF-specific thing that adds SHF_LINK_ORDER to the optimizerglobal's section
(DCE in particular) to treat all global references inpointing to the metadata argument's section. The effect of that variable'sis a reverse dependency
initializer as reverse dependencies.between sections for the linker GC.
!associated does not change the behavior of global-dce. The global
may also need to be added to llvm.compiler.used.
Since SHF_LINK_ORDER is per-section, !associated effectively enables
fdata-sections for the affected globals, the same as comdats do