It stops at linking stage with no error message at all ? It might be a linker crash.
Once upon a time, when the computing world was driven by sanity, Windows a sane operating system and Microsoft a company populated with (arguably) sane people, when a program crashed then some sensible dialog box used to be displayed to notify the user that something bad happened, but that it wasn't his fault, and offered the possibility to send a crash log to Microsoft or to save it for posterity (posterity here being a literary ellipsis for "the program's distributor").
Then someday a brilliant mind at Microsoft decided that it would improve sales if the users were not notified at all when a program crashed on their operating systems and if everything was done to hide it under the carpet instead. And so at a certain point in history, a Windows update changed the sane behavior ("hey, user, your program crashed, you might want to know about it!") to the following one: "uh? what? what program are you talking about?" It's not the only place in the world where decisional positions have been conquered by lunatics alas 😕
And so, now, when a program crash in a workflow running on Microsoft Windows, the only way to know about it is to remark that its exit code is not the expected one. Luckily, the build script does it, but it assumes that the program that failed will have printed its own error cause, as any polite program would. Unfortunately, when a program crashes, even the most polite ones may not necessarily have the time to print what happened before the OS takes them down by force.
The above rant was probably not quite useful for solving your problem, but from the point of view of someone who fights an uphill battle like me, it feels better.
To find out if it's really a linker crash, install an IDE with a system debugger (such as Visual C++) if you can, and make sure the debugger is set up to hook in when a program crashes. Run the build again, and if it's indeed a crash you'll get a message box with the possibility to enter a debugging session (which won't be very helpful at this point because you won't have the linker's source code).
Assuming you ascertained it was a crash, a likely cause is not enough memory (RAM). Some big projects require a hefty amount of RAM to link. Make sure you have enough.
If you suspect it's not the cause, then hopefully the problem is reproducible on another computer (such as mine), and in this case I'll kindly ask you to zip your Xcode project (excluding the build folder to save space) and send it to me at pm @ this domain, along with your build parameters. I'll test-run it and hopefully it'll crash at the same point, which will give me the chance to hook it with the debugger and understand what's wrong. And of course, provide an updated version with the problem fixed if I can.
