[LLVMdev] Re: ELF / COFF Interface

[Jeff Cohen]

Alexander Friedman wrote:

>>Yeah, you don't want anything like BFD.
>>
>>    
>>
>>>Here's some things I've discovered so far and associated questions:
>>>
>>>1) We're really only interested in a writing interface to create the
>>>object files.  If we get that right we can use dlsym and friends to do
>>>the reading (loading/linking).
>>>
>>>Does everyone agree that we don't need a "reading" interface?
>>>      
>>>
>>Yes, we only want writing.  Reading is something that is completely 
>>orthogonal to anything the backend will want.
>>    
>>
>
>Wouldn't it be nice to have a common way to load files on both windows
>and unix platforms? Otherwise users will have to write their own
>version that does either dlopen or the windows equivelent based on the
>os. Perhaps using libelf we could temporarily load .elf files on
>windows, untill there is a coff writer. Later we could change the
>implementation to produce COFF without changing any interface.
>
LLVM already has a platform-independent interface for dynamically 
loading libraries in lib/System for its own use.  As for users, it's not 
the purpose of LLVM to abstract away operating system APIs.  After all, 
why stop with loading libraries?  Why not file I/O, or networking, 
mutexes, or even GUIs?