[LLVMdev] Distribution in assembler format

[Russell Wallace]

One issue I've been looking at with regard to using LLVM as a compiler
backend is distribution of programs, particularly on Linux where
different distributions have different binary package formats and it
is usual to ship programs as source rather than binary; specifically,
I'm looking at the general case where the end user may not have (the
correct version of) LLVM installed, so the compiler can't simply be
run on the end user's machine.

A solution that occurs to me is to compile as far as assembler on the
programmer's machine, then ship the .s file (or a small number
thereof, one per CPU architecture) and assemble it on the user's
machine (which in most cases will have the GNU assembler installed).
It seems to me that this ought to work; are there any pitfalls I
should be aware of?