[llvm-dev] Supporting sub commands in LLVM command line tools

[Zachary Turner via llvm-dev]

Not sure I follow how this would work.  "llvm" is an executable, and "opt"
is a symlink to "llvm"?  How does llvm then detect that it needs to use the
opt set of commands?

That said, in principle sure you could have "llvm opt <opt-specific command
syntax>" or "llvm llc <llc options>".  At some point you'd probably need to
extend this to support nested subcommands, which I didn't attempt here.

On Fri, Jun 17, 2016 at 6:58 PM Mehdi Amini <mehdi.amini at apple.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I haven't looked at the implementation, but conceptually this looks nice!
>
> We talked internally about an option to build something like a single
> "llvm" binary that would be symlinked by opt/llc/etc. So that when you
> invoke `opt`, it would run the same binary but internally the right
> subcommand set of options would be used. The downside is that running
> `ninja llvm-mc` would depends on every LLVM libraries though.
>
> This is a bit orthogonal to what you’re doing, but I assume your patch
> would help to build such an option right?
>
> —
> Mehdi
>
> On Jun 17, 2016, at 5:00 PM, Zachary Turner via llvm-dev <
> llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> I've written a patch <http://reviews.llvm.org/D21485> to support
> subcommands in llvm command line tools.  This potentially has broad
> interest (either positive or negative), so I figured I'd give a heads up
> here instead of just on llvm-commits.
>
> The motivation for this is that we frequently have tools with incompatible
> sets of command line options.  I ran into this on llvm-pdbdump and was
> debating breaking off some of the functionality into a separate tool to
> make the command line interface more sensible, and to prevent people
> getting confused about which options could be used with which other options.
>
> A better approach to this, in my opinion, is the use of sub commands.
> This way all the options that can be used together are grouped together,
> and you simply can't specify incompatible options at the same time.
>
> There is more information in the patch, including some examples of what it
> looks like, so if you're interested in this or have a strong opinion one
> way or the other, let me know.
>
> Note that this is an **opt in** feature, and if you continue using cl::opt
> as you always have, this change should be invisible to you.
>
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>
>
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