[LLVMdev] Thoughts on limited forward serialization?

[Philip Reames]

On 01/06/2015 04:33 PM, Ahmed Bougacha wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 4:23 PM, Philip Reames <listmail at philipreames.com> wrote:
>> Duncan,
>>
>> I was wondering if you'd be open to making a change in the IR parser to
>> accept and ignore 'metadata' keywords in the places they used to be
>> required.  My common workflow is to use a version of clang (from the last
>> major release) to generate test IR fragments.  Right now, this is not
>> possible since IR generated by the previous released clang no longer parses
>> with TOT.
> How about going through bitcode, which AFAIK doesn't have that
> problem?  That is, assemble with the previous llvm-as, and disassemble
> with ToT llvm-dis (or use as is.)
This would certainly work.  There's a number of possible workarounds.  
I'm not claiming this is any fundamental problem, only that it's 
slightly tedious and doesn't really cost us anything to fix.

(Think about a person new to llvm who runs into this.  How are they 
going to react?)
>
> - Ahmed
>
>> I know we don't generally support forward serialization of IR, but in
>> practice, it generally works for this type of usage.  What do you think?
>>
>> Philip
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