On Thu, 3 Oct 2013, David Malcolm wrote: > Right now all you get back from the result is a "void*" which you're > meant to cast to machine code for the CPU. I guess we could add an
And right now the library is calling dlopen. Which means that although what the user gets is a void *, the dynamic linker processing has dealt with registering eh_frame information and the right hooks have been passed through for GDB to see that an object has been loaded and access its debug information. Is this use of dlopen intended to be part of the interface, or just a temporary hack with users eventually needing to use other interfaces for eh_frame and debug info handling? (GDB has some support for JITs, but I haven't looked into the details of how it works.) > option on the gcc_jit_context for setting which ISA you want code for. Even apart from completely separate ISAs, there's also the matter of other command-line options such as -march=, which I'd think users should be able to specify. And the complication that default options to cc1 can be determined by specs, whether in .h files or from configure options such as --with=arch=, so cc1's defaults may not be the same as the defaults when you run the driver (which are likely to be better defaults for the JIT than cc1's). And if the user wants to use -march=native (which seems sensible for the common use case of a JIT, generating code for the same system as runs the compiler), that's handled through specs. Maybe the driver should be converted to library code so it's possible to run command-line options through it and generate the command line that would get passed to cc1 (but then use that to call a function in the same process - with a different copy of global options data, diagnostic context etc. to avoid any issues from those being initialized twice - rather than running a subprocess). That would also allow generating the right options for the assembler to pass to the library version of the assembler. > > > * There are some grotesque kludges in internal-api.c, especially in > > > how we go from .s assembler files to a DSO (grep for "gross hack" ;) ) > > > > Apart from making the assembler into a shared library itself, it would > > also be nice to avoid needing those files at all (via an API for writing > > assembler text that doesn't depend on a FILE * pointer, although on GNU > > hosts you can always use in-memory files via open_memstream, which would > > make the internal changes much smaller). But in the absence of such a > > cleanup, running the assembler via the driver should work, although > > inefficient. > > (nods) Note that all of the kludgery (if that's a word) is hidden > inside the library, so we can fix it all up without affecting client > code: the client-facing API doesn't expose any of this. > > FWIW I added timevars for measuring the invocation of the driver; that > kludge makes up about 50% of the overall time taken. I haven't yet > broken that down into assembler vs linker vs fork/exec overhead, but > clearly this is something that could use optimization - leading to > (very) vague thoughts involving turning parts of binutils into libraries > also. First I guess it might simply be a library that receives blocks of text that currently go to asm_out_file - but eventually there might be efficiency to be gained by passing binary data to the assembler in some cases (e.g. for large blocks of debug info) rather than generating and then parsing text. (So some asm_out methods would gain implementations passing such data instead of generating text.) -- Joseph S. Myers jos...@codesourcery.com
