On Dec 19, 2007, at 2:19 PM, Tim Josling wrote:
...
http://gcc.gnu.org/projects/lto/lto.pdf
...
Was there any more about this?
I have restarted work on my COBOL front end. Based on my previous
experiences writing a GCC front end I want to have as little code as
possible in the same process as the GCC back end.
This means passing over a file. So I would like to understand how to
avoid getting into political/legal trouble when doing this.
While it is possible to make this work once LTO is finished, it seems
unlikely that it will be pleasant. Doing so will basically mean
reimplementing a 'writer' for the LTO format to interoperate with the
GCC code. This seems to be a hard task, as there is no document on
the structure and contents of the LTO file. OTOH, you can get this
by reverse engineering the code to find out what it does. Further,
it has been publicly stated that the format will evolve and is not
going to be stable (though I don't recall where). Unless you want to
fight to keep up with the format, this sounds like a major pain.
You might be interested in checking out LLVM: http://llvm.org/ which
has a well defined and well specified file formats (one text and one
binary), and preserves backwards compatibility with them across major
release (i.e. 1.0 -> 1.9 and 2.0 -> 2.x). http://llvm.org/docs/
LangRef.html
I'd be interested to hear if keeping the LTO format stable is
something the GCC community plans to do,
-Chris
