[LLVMdev] LLD: Removing Native file format?

[Rui Ueyama]

On Thu, Apr 9, 2015 at 1:04 PM, Davide Italiano <davide at freebsd.org> wrote:

> On Thu, Apr 9, 2015 at 12:17 PM, Rui Ueyama <ruiu at google.com> wrote:
> > I think I bought up this topic before, but I'd like to propose seriously
> > removing the Native file format from LLD this time.
> >
> > IIUC, the Native file format was designed to be the fastest on-memory or
> > on-disk file format for object files. The problem is that no one is
> working
> > on that. No LLVM tools can produce object files in the Native, thus the
> > feature of supporting the format is useless in the linker.
> >
> > I'm also skeptical about the very idea of defining a new file format
> since
> > existing file formats look to be good enough.
> >
> > It's maintenance cost is real. I needed to submit a few patches for the
> > Native format for global refactoring.
> >
> > Here I'm proposing removing the Native file format support from LLD
> unless
> > there's a person who's going to take the ownership of the feature and
> push
> > really hard to adopt the file format everywhere (not only in the linker).
> >
> > Opinions?
>
> With my FreeBSD hat on:
> FreeBSD doesn't talk anything that's not ELF, it's already pretty
> time-expensive implementing full support for that to even think about
> a different format.
> With my LLD hat on:
> I've been slowed down from time to time because my patches didn't have
> support for YAML or Native format. I personally would be very happy to
> not have to worry about yet-another-different-format that at the time
> of writing is just incomplete enough to be meaningful.
>

Yup, I was slowed down too. I think the situation was mitigated because I
removed the round-trip tests, which required us to serialize/de-serialize
intermediate linker results from/to on-disk files, but yeah, it's there
like tax. I'm not proposing removing YAML though, since it's useful for
writing tests. I want to stop supporting the Native.
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