[LLVMdev] RFC: Are we ready to completely move away from the optionality of a DataLayout?

[Chris Lattner]

On Oct 19, 2014, at 2:20 PM, Duncan P. N. Exon Smith <dexonsmith at apple.com> wrote:
>>> It makes me feel like DataLayout should live in the context, but then
>>> LTO is an issue with linking modules with different layouts (is that
>>> even allowed?
>> 
>> I think that, generally speaking, this does not make sense. You could imagine linking together two modules where one data layout was a "subset" of the other (one is missing details of the vector types, for example, in a module that used no vector types), but even that seems tenuous.
>> 
> 
> If you're suggesting that a given context should only support modules
> with a single common data layout, that doesn't make sense to me.
> 
> Even if we don't want to support *linking* modules with different data
> layouts, why wouldn't we support loading them both from bitcode in the
> same context?  Seems like an awkward limitation.

I agree.  LLVMContext is about threading, not about datalayout.  It is perfectly reasonable to use the same LLVM Context to hold IR for two different LLVM modules with different datalayout strings.

-Chris