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Re: Discussion about merging Go frontend


On 10/25/2010 7:01 PM, Dave Korn wrote:

>   What would be even nicer would be if we could share the same code-reader
> interface between lto and go (and the lto-plugin), thereby getting object
> format independence equally everywhere for no extra cost.
> 
>   That could be orthogonal to plugging elfcpp into the role currently occupied
> by libelf in that reader.

I think it's reasonable to argue that GCC should, going forward, be an
ELF-only toolchain -- with postprocessing tools for generating PE/COFF,
Symbian DLLs, Mach-O or what have you.  But, we haven't made that
decision.  So, I don't think we should get there by half-measures.

Either we should decide that's what we want to do, or we should try to
keep the compiler independent of the object file format -- as we have up
until now.  I understand Ian's distaste for BFD, but it is the
format-independent object file reader we have, so it seems a natural
choice.  And libelf, which we already rely on seems more natural than
elfcpp, if we're willing to go ELF-only -- unless we're going to replace
the use of libelf in LTO with elfcpp as well.

In any case, I think we should avoid a single compiler build requiring
multiple object-file reading libraries.

-- 
Mark Mitchell
CodeSourcery
mark@codesourcery.com
(650) 331-3385 x713


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