How to link code into EXE, or, am I doing this wrong?

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Hi,

I’ve been writing a 80’s era-flavor of QuickBASIC compiler based on LLVM, and it’s come surprisingly far very quickly, LLVM is working great. GOSUB’s, GOTO’s, FIELD statements.

I’m using Visual Studio 2010.
Here’s my setup: I use LLVM to turn my AST into code, which, during debugging I then execute natively using “getPointerToFunction” and the runtime library it uses is a .lib in my VS2010 project that it calls into.
Then, to produce an EXE, I use addPassesToEmitFile to produce an .OBJ file for the native machine (x86 windows), which I then link with my runtime library using the Visual Studio linker:

link.exe test.bas.obj debug\BPRuntime.lib kernel32.lib /subsystem:console

Which produces a native executable that executes just fine under Windows.

All of that works great.

What I can’t figure out, even after LOTS of searching, is how to replace that with a LLVM linker or some other linker so that I can give out my compiler and people could use it to make EXE files. I found similar posts and questions but no good answers, and it seems that some of this (an LLVM linker) is in flux.

Or, am I going about this wrong? Should I be generating bitcode and making my runtime lib be bitcode and then link them using LLVM tools?

Thanks!

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llvm currently has no way to generate PECOFF executables except to
rely on the system linker. Your current options are:

* Include the MinGW ld in your distribution.
* Always use the llvm jit (with or without compiling your runtime to bitcode).
* Wait for http://lld.llvm.org/ to become feature complete.

- Michael Spencer

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If you build for an i386-*-win32 or x86_64-*-win32 target, you should also
be able to link LLVM object files with the MSVC link.exe.

-Joe