[llvm-dev] [lld] r271569 - Start adding tlsdesc support for aarch64.

[Rafael Espíndola via llvm-dev]

> This is not an isolated incident. This seems to be the general
> behaviour around LLD, which is less so in the rest of the LLVM
> projects.

Do keep in mind you are comparing a 11 year old project and a 11 month
old one. There is a lot more churn on the 11 month old one.

> The obliteration of the old ELF back-end was discussed only between a
> few people, not on the list. The technical reasoning could have been
> solid for a new back-end, but not for destroying fresh code. The
> removal was weeks after Adhemerval had LLD bootstrapping Clang on
> AArch64 upstream.

Again, I am truly sorry we were unable to come up with a perfect
design the first time. For the record, I don't think it is perfect
yet. There will likely be more big changes to lld. That is the cost of
trying to build as good a linker as we can.

If you thing the old one is better, feel free to try to make it work
better than the current one. It will always be available on svn
history.

> There were backlashes to that decision, as well as other decisions in
> this list, and many people have already demonstrated discontent with
> how LLD patches and decisions are handled.
>
> During EuroLLVM's LLD presentation, a lot of people asked technical
> questions about the implementation of wanted features like library
> order, linker scripts, version scripts, and all answers were "it's not
> that hard, it's all in my head, don't worry about it".


Being open source doesn't mean I get to implement what someone else
wants. You are more than welcome to send patches, but they have avoid
harming the rest of the linker. In particular, at this early stage
they cannot harm its development. Once we have a mature project we can
actually evaluate tradeoff.

And just like we did, you are more than welcome to try to write
something better. Please let us know how it goes.

Cheers,
Rafael