[LLVMdev] New binary formats just for LLVM?

[Joshua Cranmer]

On 5/28/2012 9:13 AM, Mikael Lyngvig wrote:
> What do you nowadays with LLVM extensions?  Do you encode them in the 
> bitcode that you output to object files or what.  I'm thinking of all 
> the information that usually gets lots when you output an ordinary 
> object file: pretty much all but the binary image and a set public 
> symbols and relocations.
>
> My angle to LLVM is this: LLVM is the future, GCC is the past.  Not 
> all may agree with me, but I think we'll see GCC fade away as 
> clang/clang++ become more widely used.  So why accept the limitations 
> of GCC object file formats?

Because they're not GCC's object file formats, they're (according to 
Wikipedia at least) a development of System V ABI. You also have the 
issue that there is an important subset of programs that rely on the 
format of the executables: defining your own file format for an 
executable breaks shared library loading on Unix-based systems without 
modifying the appropriate version of libc. You might be able to pull it 
off if you can give strong reasons why this new format is better, but 
"gcc is dead" isn't a very good reason.

-- 
Joshua Cranmer
News submodule owner
DXR coauthor