[LLVMdev] What's the difference between using llvm-link and using llvm gold plugin?

[Rafael Espíndola]

On 26 June 2012 16:46, Tianyin Xu <tixu at cs.ucsd.edu> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm sorry if the question doesn't fit this mailing list. It seems that LLVM
> does not have a user support mailing list so I post it here.
>
> We're using the LLVM tool chain as our static analysis infrastructure. So,
> basically we use LLVM to generate an aggregated .bc file and analyze the .bc
> file.
>
> The question I want to ask is what's the difference between using the LLVM
> gold plugin to generate the .bc file and using llvm-link?
>
> Previously, we use gold plugin which is quite handy. However, for some
> special code base, we can only get a bunch of small .bc file, each of which
> corresponding to a C or CPP file. So I'm thinking to use llvm-link to link
> them together into one big .bc file. Here comes this question.

Gold is a full linker, so it is able to do things llvm-link is not,
like reading ELF files and archives. Being a full linker, it is also
able to create a list of symbols that are needed and pass that to
llvm's internalize pass.

> Thanks a lot for the help!
>
> Best regards,
> Tianyin


Cheers,
Rafael