[LLVMdev] RFC: Staging area proposal for new backends

[David Röthlisberger]

On 30 Jul 2012, at 19:18, Tom Stellard wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 27, 2012 at 10:54:21PM -0400, Justin Holewinski wrote:
>> Add a ENABLE_EXPERIMENTAL or ENABLE_STAGING flag that allows experimental features to be built (default: OFF)
>> Add an LLVM_STAGING_TARGETS list that contains all of the staging back-ends
>> Allow LLVM_TARGETS_TO_BUILD to contain a back-end from LLVM_STAGING_TARGETS *only* if ENABLE_STAGING is ON
> 
> I've submitted a patch[1] that adds this option.
> 
> [1] http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/llvm-commits/Week-of-Mon-20120730/147282.html


Could we perhaps call these LLVM_ENABLE_EXPERIMENTAL and LLVM_EXPERIMENTAL_TARGETS, instead of STAGING?  I don't know how clear the meaning of "staging" will be to someone who hasn't been following this discussion. (Someone who isn't a compiler guru might wonder whether "staging" has some special meaning in the field of compilers.)

The only places that "staging" is currently mentioned in the LLVM sources are:

* the comments in lib/MC/WinCOFFObjectWriter.cpp, which mention "staging data for a COFF relocation entry".

* the comments in utils/llvm-compilers-check, where "staging" means something slightly different from this proposal.

Cheers,
Dave.