[llvm-dev] LLD status update and performance chart

[Rafael Avila de Espindola via llvm-dev]

Hal Finkel <hfinkel at anl.gov> writes:
>
>> Please tell me what you think about how reusable components would be
>> like. Which parts of the linker can be reusable components? Is that
>> really feasible?
> As far as I'm concerned, your response, "That said, I think the current our 'API' to allow users call our linker's main function hit the sweet spot. I know at least a few LLVM-based language developers who want to eliminate external dependencies and embed a linker to their compilers. That's a reasonable usage, and I think allowing them to pass a map from filename to MemoryBuffer objects makes sense, too. That would be done without affecting the overall linker architecture. I don't oppose to that idea, and if someone wrote a patch, I'm fine with that" is perfectly appropriate. We need to guide these discussions with use cases, and that's the use case that's been provided so far. 
>
> Longer term, we also should take a serious look at how to unify the functionality in LLD with that in our JIT runtime linker. Having two linkers in the LLVM project, one for use with the JIT and one for other things, seems suboptimal. 

In my opinion having a general linker in the JIT is sub optimal. We
should not be desiginig lld around an idea there is not even a consensus
to. And even if it is case that having a general linker is the best way
to write a JIT (I would love to know why a JIT needs something that
handles copy relocations), we will not be able to evaluate the trade
offs with the stand alone lld until we finished it.

Cheers,
Rafael