[LLVMdev] RFC: Staging area proposal for new backends

[Tom Stellard]

On Tue, Jul 31, 2012 at 07:22:02AM +0100, David Röthlisberger wrote:
> 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.)
>

I think this makes sense.  I'll update the patches.

-Tom

> 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.
> 
>