[LLVMdev] Thoughts on limited forward serialization?

[Duncan P. N. Exon Smith]

> On 2015-Jan-06, at 16:23, 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.
> 
> 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

I don't like the precedent this would set.  There was some discussion
on the list already about this, starting with [1].

[1]: http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/llvmdev/2014-December/079941.html
[2]: http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/llvmdev/2014-December/079958.html

I think you'd be better off generating testcases from ToT, or outputting
to bitcode and using `llvm-dis` from ToT.