[LLVMdev] ObjectFiles.html

[Chris Lattner]

> While I understand the motivations you describe above, something about
> this bothers me.  As a tool provider the LLVM developers are trying to
> provide small/fast/quick linking tools. The above approach helps with
> some of that.  However, I'm an LLVM user and a big part of using LLVM is
> linking my code with LLVM code. When the LLVM developers opt to make a
> .o "library", they're essentially forcing users to take all or nothing.

Exactly.

> As you mentioned in the case of x86 backend, this may make a lot of
> sense. On the other hand, it presumes the developers of LLVM know how
> the users want to use LLVM!  Say there's a little utility function in
> the x86 backend that I want to use but I'm not generating any x86 code?

If you're not generating X86 code, don't use the X86 library.  :)  The
idea is that LLVM is broken up into libraries that are already probably
already too fine-grained.  If you don't need something, just don't link to
it...

> > Overall, this looks really useful, especially when the dependency
> > information is built.  Perhaps this should eventually be integrated into
> > the programmers manual though?
>
> Perhaps, but with hypertext, what does "integrated" really mean? :)

Well, in the long term we want to switch everything over to docbook, at
which point it should just be a matter of doing the equiv of "#include
ObjectFiles.html", and we suddenly have a new section in the book...

-Chris

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