<div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><br></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Thu, 6 Feb 2020 at 00:24, Jon Chesterfield via llvm-dev <<a href="mailto:llvm-dev@lists.llvm.org">llvm-dev@lists.llvm.org</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">From: James Henderson via llvm-dev <<a href="mailto:llvm-dev@lists.llvm.org" target="_blank">llvm-dev@lists.llvm.org</a>><br>
To: Oliver Stannard <<a href="mailto:oliver.stannard@linaro.org" target="_blank">oliver.stannard@linaro.org</a>><br>
Cc: LLVM Dev <<a href="mailto:llvm-dev@lists.llvm.org" target="_blank">llvm-dev@lists.llvm.org</a>><br>
Subject: Re: [llvm-dev] [RFC] Case insensitive assembly directives for<br>
all targets<br><br>
+1 to all of what Oliver said. We aim for compatibility with GNU in most<br>
(all?) of our other binutils, so why should the assembler be any different?<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>This doesn't sound right. GNU binutils have a large quantity of legacy cruft, not least the redundancy between tools like readelf and objdump which are capable of doing the same task in exchange for different command line arguments.</div></div></div></blockquote><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_quote"><div><br></div><div>Our from-scratch binutils suite has the opportunity to be much easier to use than GNU's tooling. Where was this policy, which sounds like replicating their design mistakes bug-for-bug, agreed upon and documented?</div></div></div></blockquote><div>
<div>Many tools (readelf, objdump, nm, objcopy etc) are used in many people's build systems, quite often in deep configure scripts that are hard to maintain or update for whatever reason. There have been multiple talks on this sort of topic at various LLVM conferences (examples include
Bernhard Rosenkränzer and Jordan Rupprecht's talks at Brussels 2019), where people have highlighted pain points. Additionally, I have been part of or run both BoFs (again Brussels 2019) and round tables on the topic. The overwhelming consensus from everyone there was that people wanted compatibility with GNU to make it easier for them to switch over to using the LLVM tools. These discussions were written up on the mailing list (see <a href="http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2019-April/132032.html">http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2019-April/132032.html</a> and <a href="https://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2019-April/132033.html">https://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2019-April/132033.html</a> for two recent examples). The principle is discussed on multiple reviews of changes for the tools too.</div><div><br></div><div>To be clear, if there is a bug in the GNU tool, we don't try to match that. We've also made multiple extensions and improvements over what GNU does in some tools, some of which were also adopted in the GNU equivalent afterwards.</div><div><br></div><div>Note that there are some tools (llvm-readobj, llvm-symbolizer) which are not GNU compatible, and go their own way in output styles and command-line processing. These both have switches and tool aliases that allow them to be used in a GNU-like manner though too.<br></div>
</div><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_quote"><div><br></div><div>Aside from the above query, case sensitive asm doesn't sound like a good feature to me either.</div><div><br></div><div>Thanks</div></div></div>
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