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

[Sanjiv Gupta]

Nick Lewycky wrote:
> Sanjiv Gupta wrote:
>> Nick Lewycky wrote:
>>> 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
>> Well, -link-as-library is not quite same as a building a final 
>> executable .bc.
>
> .bc files aren't executable so I'm not entirely sure what you mean. 
> 'llvm-ld -link-as-library' takes a group of .bc files and merges them 
> before running the link-time optimizations over them, then emits the 
> result as a .bc file.
>
>> The set of optimizations run is also different.
>
> How so?
>
> Checking llvm-ld's source, the only possible difference I can see is 
> that passing -link-as-library will cause llvm-ld to ignore the 
> -post-link-opts flag which almost certainly doesn't matter because you 
> were almost certainly not using it.
>
> Nick
if (LinkAsLibrary) {
      ...
      if (TheLinker.LinkInFiles(Files))
      ...
else {
     .....
      // Link all the items together
      if (TheLinker.LinkInItems(Items, NativeLinkItems) )


I don't think that LinkInFiles () and LinkInItems () do the same thing.

- Sanijv