[PATCH] D12685: Document the stability policy for LLVM-C APIs.

[James Y Knight via llvm-commits]

jyknight added a comment.

> OK, I mean sure, I'd like this too, but I think enough users at least care about the "being able to read" and probably "be able to execute" IR created by an older process when a newer llvm comes onto the system. I'm thinking in the graphics driver area that Mehdi works in. I think webkit even uses the C++ API for creation and the C API for the jit. Basically the stable C API could be the same as the bitcode guarantees + deprecation if we change something drastically - we support reading older IR and autoupgrading it to something that can be used.


I'm not sure what you're saying there. Are you saying you want to provide a more stable C IR Building API? That if we remove an instruction from IR, that we should continue to support emitting the instruction from the C API the same way autoupgrade from an old IR format supports reading it?

That seems like it'd be a lot of extra work that nobody has signed up to do, to me -- if you want to emit old IR, doesn't it make more sense to just continue linking the old version of LLVM?


http://reviews.llvm.org/D12685