Alexander Friedman wrote:
Yeah, you don't want anything like BFD.
Here's some things I've discovered so far and associated questions:
1) We're really only interested in a writing interface to create the
object files. If we get that right we can use dlsym and friends to do
the reading (loading/linking).Does everyone agree that we don't need a "reading" interface?
Yes, we only want writing. Reading is something that is completely orthogonal to anything the backend will want.
Wouldn't it be nice to have a common way to load files on both windows
and unix platforms? Otherwise users will have to write their own
version that does either dlopen or the windows equivelent based on the
os. Perhaps using libelf we could temporarily load .elf files on
windows, untill there is a coff writer. Later we could change the
implementation to produce COFF without changing any interface.
LLVM already has a platform-independent interface for dynamically loading libraries in lib/System for its own use. As for users, it's not the purpose of LLVM to abstract away operating system APIs. After all, why stop with loading libraries? Why not file I/O, or networking, mutexes, or even GUIs?