[llvm-dev] End-to-end -fembed-bitcode .llvmbc and .llvmcmd

[Mircea Trofin via llvm-dev]

Hello,

I'm trying to understand how .llvmbc and .llvmcmd fit into an end-to-end
story. From the RFC
<http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2016-February/094851.html>, and
reading through the implementation, I'm piecing together that the goal was
to enable capturing IR right after clang and before passing it to
LLVM's optimization passes, as well as the command line options needed for
later compiling that IR to the same native object it was compiled to
originally (with the same compiler).

Here's what I don't understand: say you have a.o and b.o compiled with
-fembed-bitcode=all. They are linked into a binary called my_binary. How do
you re-create the corresponding IR for modules a and b (let's call them
a.bc and b.bc), and their corresponding command lines? From what I can
tell, the linker just concatenates the IR for a and b in my_binary's
.llvmbc, and the same for the command line in .llvmcmd. Is there a
separator maybe I missed? For .llvmcmd, I could see how *maybe* -cc1 could
be that separator, what about the .llvmbc part? The magic number?

Thanks!
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