[llvm-dev] [cfe-dev] [PATCH/DRAFT] Embed metadata into object file

[Christian Dietrich via llvm-dev]

Mehdi Amini <mehdi.amini at apple.com> writes:

> Worded like that, I can see a close analogy with  "Debug Info".

Indeed, it is very similar, but there are some differences and
shortcoming, if a developer only wants to smuggle some metadata out in a
very specific format:

For the IR->ELF path, the debug information is encoded as Dwarf (or
  something else) in the binary. The plugin developer has not much
  control about the binary format of the data. !llvm.extra_sections
  would give a quite fine-grained control.

For the AST->IR path, I don't see an easy way to annotate a few pieces
  of information in the AST without spinning up the whole
  debug-information generation process.

>> [1] This is a _seperate_ drawback of clang plugins at the moment: They
>>    cannot define an LLVM IR transformation that should be applied when
>>    the plugin is active.
>
> You can write clang plugin that are LLVM pass and insert them in the
> pipeline.

I can? How? I have not seen any possibility to inject a LLVM pass into
the Clang CodeGen PassManager infrastructure from a clang plugin, which
is also FrontentAction like CodeGen.

>
>> I think it would be useful for many analyzes
>>    to have access both to the AST and to the IR.
>
> This is more fuzzy to me, I don't know enough about clang but I'm not
> sure the design allow to keep a link from the IR to the clang AST? (If
> it is the case, I'd be curious to see how it works).

If you restrict the possible subjects to top-level functions, global
variables, and the compilation unit, this should be implementable quite
straight forward.

chris
-- 
Christian Dietrich, M.Sc. (Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter)
Lehrstuhl für Informatik 4 (Verteilte Systeme und Betriebssysteme)
Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg
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