[LLVMdev] Win32 COFF Support

[Michael Spencer]

On Sun, Jun 13, 2010 at 4:43 PM, Nathan Jeffords
<blunted2night at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I know some people are working on native linkers for LLVM. It would be
>> interesting to see an architecture for handling object files that
>> could be shared between lib/MC and a linker.
>
>
> This would be good I think.
> If a linker loaded object files into an IR, maybe CAssembler could handle
> the linking process also. Would it be safe to assume that on a
> development/build machine, the executable image, and all the object files it
> will be made up of could be loaded into memory in some IR? Or would an
> architecture where the linker only reads headers and symbol information into
> memory and then copies data sections into the final EXE on the fly?

Considering how large object files can get, I would think it's not a
good idea to load all the content of all the object files into an IR.
However, the object file headers could be loaded into an IR that
references the data still on disk, and then lazily load the data when
it is time to insert relocations and write out the final executable.

I would also assume that the linker should be able to accept llvm byte
code and output an executable. In a pure llvm/clang tool chain there
should be no reason to use native object files other than linking
against code you only have in native format.

And back to the topic at hand. I have attached tests that work with
the changes Daniel made to lit. I switched to using llc and .ll files
instead of llvm-mc and .s files due to the lack of COFF support in
llvm-mc.

- Michael Spencer
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