Re: Discussion about merging Go frontend

[Ian Lance Taylor <iant at google dot com>]

Mark Mitchell <mark@codesourcery.com> writes:

> On 10/24/2010 10:52 PM, Ian Lance Taylor wrote:
>
>> It's hard for me to believe that BFD is the correct answer.  It's poorly
>> designed for the kinds of things the compiler needs to do.  Any program
>> which links against BFD effectively links in the GNU linker.
>
> It sounded from your mail like all the compiler needs to do is to read
> the binary contents of a named section.  Isn't that something that BFD
> does well?

BFD will get the job done.  But I don't think it's a good choice for
releasing a program like gcc.

BFD is in effect an internal library for the linker and the GNU
binutils, and it's also used by the assembler.  It doesn't really
maintain source compatibility across releases, and it definitely doesn't
maintain binary compatibility.  As I mentioned above, when you link
against BFD you effectively pull in the linker.

Reading a section from an object file is not hard.  Linking against BFD
to do it is massive overkill.  If we were already linking against BFD,
then sure.  But introducing BFD for this will give us and the binutils
developers some long-term maintenance pain for limited reward.

At least, that is how I see it.

Ian