[LLVMdev] RFC: auto-linking IR proposal

[Gao, Yunzhong]

Hi Daniel,

>> My understanding of the Microsoft #pragma comment(lib, ...) semantics is that
>> each specified library will be converted into a directive that starts with
>> "/DEFAULTLIB" in the COFF .drectve section. To demonstrate, the following patch
>> produces directives that work with Visual Studio 2010 using the now-deprecated
>> dependent library feature (commits r168779 and r168694).

> Is that feature now-deprecated? The documentation here:
>  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/7f0aews7.aspx
> only talks about the "exestr" comment type being deprecated.
> I see that the /defaultlib flag itself to the linker is deprecated, but it isn't clear to me that that means the dependent library feature is also deprecated.

To clarify, at one point LLVM IR had a way to list dependent libraries in the form of
deplibs = [ "blah.lib", "foo.lib" ]

This feature was later removed in llvm commit r168694, which is what I referred to as being deprecated. i.e., I was not saying that the MSVC defaultlib flag is being deprecated.

- Gao.