We have previously always relied upon an external tool, `ar`, to modify archives
that the compiler produces (staticlibs, rlibs, etc). This approach, however, has
a number of downsides:
* Spawning a process is relatively expensive for small compilations
* Encoding arguments across process boundaries often incurs unnecessary overhead
or lossiness. For example `ar` has a tough time dealing with files that have
the same name in archives, and the compiler copies many files around to ensure
they can be passed to `ar` in a reasonable fashion.
* Most `ar` programs found do **not** have the ability to target arbitrary
platforms, so this is an extra tool which needs to be found/specified when
cross compiling.
The LLVM project has had a tool called `llvm-ar` for quite some time now, but it
wasn't available in the standard LLVM libraries (it was just a standalone
program). Recently, however, in LLVM 3.7, this functionality has been moved to a
library and is now accessible by consumers of LLVM via the `writeArchive`
function.
This commit migrates our archive bindings to no longer invoke `ar` by default
but instead make a library call to LLVM to do various operations. This solves
all of the downsides listed above:
* Archive management is now much faster, for example creating a "hello world"
staticlib is now 6x faster (50ms => 8ms). Linking dynamic libraries also
recently started requiring modification of rlibs, and linking a hello world
dynamic library is now 2x faster.
* The compiler is now one step closer to "hassle free" cross compilation because
no external tool is needed for managing archives, LLVM does the right thing!
This commit does not remove support for calling a system `ar` utility currently.
We will continue to maintain compatibility with LLVM 3.5 and 3.6 looking forward
(so the system LLVM can be used wherever possible), and in these cases we must
shell out to a system utility. All nightly builds of Rust, however, will stop
needing a system `ar`.
This commit updates the rustllvm.mk file with the necessary flags and such to
build rustllvm.lib with cl.exe instead of gcc. Some comments can be found in the
commit itself.
Before this patch, if you wanted to add a crate to the build system you had to
change about 100 lines across 8 separate makefiles. This is highly error prone
and opaque to all but a few. This refactoring is targeted at consolidating this
effort so adding a new crate adds one line in one file in a way that everyone
can understand it.
In order to keep up to date with changes to the libraries that `llvm-config`
spits out, the dependencies to the LLVM are a dynamically generated rust file.
This file is now automatically updated whenever LLVM is updated to get kept
up-to-date.
At the same time, this cleans out some old cruft which isn't necessary in the
makefiles in terms of dependencies.
Closes#10745Closes#10744
Refactor the optimization passes to explicitly use the passes. This commit
just re-implements the same passes as were already being run.
It also adds an option (behind `-Z`) to run the LLVM lint pass on the
unoptimized IR.
Andrea Canciani