[LLVMdev] Distribution in assembler format

[Russell Wallace]

Ah! Thanks, that's exactly what I needed to know (albeit was hoping
not to hear :-)).

Hmm, that actually kills every possible solution I can think of, so
the good news is, it takes the problem off my to-do list (albeit via
the 'unsolvable' route rather than the 'solved' route), and unless
anyone else has a possible solution, I can take it off my to-do list
:-)

On Fri, Jan 29, 2010 at 7:51 PM, John Criswell <criswell at uiuc.edu> wrote:
> Russell Wallace wrote:
>>
>> 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?
>>
>
> A potential problem with this approach is that different Linux systems have
> different versions of header files and libraries.  While the machine code
> will assemble correctly, it may not link (because a native code library is
> missing or is of an incorrect version) or the generated code will not work
> properly (because some structure in a header file is different between the
> system used for compilation and the system on which the program is
> installed).
>
> Shipping assembly code is more or less equivalent to shipping a binary.  If
> shipping native code will work, then shipping assembly code will work (in
> which case, why ship assembly code instead of a native binary?).
>
> -- John T.
>>
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