[LLVMdev] Linking tools

[Steve King]

On Mon, Jul 27, 2015 at 9:52 AM, Reid Kleckner <rnk at google.com> wrote:

> From the perspective of LTO, we just want users to be able
> to add -flto to their compile and link lines, and make that produce a faster
> executable, without the user ever being aware of the bitcode.

For targets without GNU binutils and gcc driver support, has this goal
been achieved?  The few times I've tried, Clang's hard-coded
dependencies on host GNU tools block LTO and linked binaries in
general.  For my target, manually running llvm-link and llc is the
only way to get LTO-like output, but otherwise works pretty well.

For this same reason, I get worried when I hear maintainers state that
llvm-link, llc, llvm-mc, etc are developer only tools.  GNUless
targets use these tools for production code for lack of working
alternatives.

If there's been recent progress on removing GNU dependencies, I'm all ears.

Cheers,
-steve