[LLVMdev] ld with gold-plugin can do this?

[Nick Lewycky]

Sanjiv.Gupta at microchip.com wrote:
> 
> 
> A common followup question is "but how do I link native libraries into
> my .bc file". You don't. A .bc file is llvm ir, you can't put a native
> binary library into a .bc (barring sticking it in as a string, etc).
> 
> The build then looks like:
> 
> a) 'llvm-gcc -c -flo -O2' to generate the .bc files.
> b) 'llvm-ld' to combine them into a single .bc. No, not a .so nor a .a.
> c) 'llc' to turn your combined .bc into a .s
> d) 'as' to turn your .s into a .o
> e) 'ld' to turn your .o into a .so or final executable. This is the step
> where you get to specify all the native libraries to link with.
> 
> You can use 'gcc' to merge steps d and e (it just runs as and ld for
> you). Or you can use the gold plugin to merge steps b through e, but
> with the added benefit that it will optimize slightly better. See the
> llvm LTO documentation on why.
> 
> [Sanjiv] - This is what PIC16 does. llvm-ld has an option called '-b' 
> that you can
> use to specify the output bitcode file name. Unfortunately, llvm-ld 
> always tries to
> generate a native executable (or a shell script) as well and currently 
> there is no way to disable that.
> Maybe an option like '-no-native' will be come handy.

Yes there is, it's -link-as-library.

Nick