[LLVMdev] Proposal: extended MDString syntax

[Eric Christopher]

On Wed, Jun 26, 2013 at 3:59 PM, Nadav Rotem <nrotem at apple.com> wrote:
>
> On Jun 26, 2013, at 3:51 PM, Chandler Carruth <chandlerc at google.com> wrote:
>
> Can you suggest an alternative solution? Can you describe why you don't
> think metadata is the right container? This alone isn't really helpful at
> moving us toward something that there has been widespread agreement LLVM
> needs.
>
>
> Hi Chandler,
>
> Sure, we can talk about serializing MF.  But the discussion should focus on
> serializing MF, and not multi-line metadata support, which is only one of
> the possible solutions.  I understand the problem that Dan mentioned (that
> MF references IR), and I am sure that there are other problems that he did
> not mention. I would be happy to hear more about other solutions that you
> considered and other problems that you ran into.  Have you considered using
> a new format that embeds LLVM-IR ?
>

(Note, this is the first I've heard of this plan and just figured it out myself)

So inverting it so that MI contains LLVM IR instead of the other way
around? Then we'd need a serialization format for MI that happened to
include a way of serializing LLVM IR within. From a quick "hey, this
seems reasonable" the idea of embedding the MI into the IR rather than
the other way around seems to make sense since we have already have
code to serialize the IR.

The only other idea I've seen was an intern project that really didn't
go very far a few years ago of using *AML (one of them, I can't recall
which). I think Bob had some idea of finishing the project, but I'm
not sure where it's going.

Do you have any other ideas or some ideas as to why you'd prefer one
direction rather than the other?

-eric