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 m...@codesourcery.com (650) 331-3385 x713