[LLVMdev] Proposal: support object file-based on-disk module format

[David Chisnall]

On 8 Jul 2014, at 19:43, Peter Collingbourne <peter at pcc.me.uk> wrote:

> If the linker never sees the intermediate object files, this will not
> happen. This is the case under the current proposal. However, if we codegen
> into the object files, we might want to make those object files visible to
> the linker. In which case, the compiler can use an object-format-specific
> exclude flag [1] to exclude those sections from the executable or DSO.

We (current hat: FreeBSD) would like to be able to leave the LLVM IR in programs and shared libraries so that packaging tools can run microarchitecure-specific optimisations on the result, either offline or at install time (and a few other things, including applying software diversity techniques and so on).

David