[LLVMdev] Using the unused "version" field in the bitcode wrapper (redux)

[Reid Kleckner]

On Mon, Nov 24, 2014 at 9:41 PM, Sean Silva <chisophugis at gmail.com> wrote:

> I fail to see why all that re-engineering effort IS "required" to support
>> the use-cases we've provided, and why future-proofing a large body of
>> software that quite honestly was never designed for it and has genuinely
>> very few reasons why it should be.
>>
>>
>>
>> If we're going to support bitcode as a long-term storage format,
>> everything that pulls information out of bitcode MUST be future-proofed.
>> Doing it piece by piece is a LOT of engineering effort to make LLVM
>> user-friendly in this way; it was never intended to have that degree of
>> self-defense.
>>
>
> I don't understand what you mean by "future-proofed" in this context. If
> you mean "never crash on bad user input", then your point doesn't make
> sense to me. LLVM is engineered to never crash on bad user input in the
> same sense that it is engineered to correctly compile code; neither is
> allowed, and if either happens it is a bug.
>

This is true, but we can say from experience that there are a lot of these
kinds of bugs and it will take a lot of effort to fix them all. Personally,
I think this worth doing. We should be using the new diagnostic handler on
the LLVMContext, and most of LLVM should have a way of returning without
exploding.
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