[llvm-dev] Why is LTO built as a shared lib?

[Antoine Pitrou via llvm-dev]

Hello,

LTO is currently the only library which is always built as shared, even
under Windows. This actually seems to lead to failure using LLVM in
another project under Windows, at least for me (the error message
complains about "LTO-NOTFOUND.OBJ"). Switching it to a static library
fixes the issue (again, at least for me under Windows).

The change was made in:
http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-commits/Week-of-Mon-20140623/223433.html

While it seems the original complaint was the explicit "STATIC" marker
in the call to add_llvm_library(), the patch added an explicit "SHARED"
marker which isn't used elsewhere.

Also, a quick look through the bin/ directory under Linux seems to
suggest none of the executables (even llvm-lto) links dynamically
against LTO.so.

Regards

Antoine.

_______________________________________________
LLVM Developers mailing list
llvm...@lists.llvm.org
http://lists.llvm.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/llvm-dev

[David Chisnall via llvm-dev]

libLTO is a loadable library that linkers use to call into LLVM to do link-time optimisation. It doesn’t make sense for it to be a static library. I’m not 100% convinced that it makes sense for it to be built on Windows at all, because (as far as I am aware) neither Gold nor ld64 (the two current consumers of libLTO) are supported on Windows.

David

[Antoine Pitrou via llvm-dev]

On Tue, 26 Jan 2016 12:08:35 +0000
David Chisnall via llvm-dev <llvm...@lists.llvm.org> wrote:
> libLTO is a loadable library that linkers use to call into LLVM to do link-time optimisation. It doesn’t make sense for it to be a static library. I’m not 100% convinced that it makes sense for it to be built on Windows at all, because (as far as I am aware) neither Gold nor ld64 (the two current consumers of libLTO) are supported on Windows.

Thank you. I didn't have this issue on 3.6.1 (even though LTO.dll was
apparently built too), so perhaps something changed during 3.6.1 and
3.7.1 that added LTO to the libraries considered by
llvm_map_components_to_libnames().

[Dave Bozier via llvm-dev]

> I’m not 100% convinced that it makes sense for it to be built on Windows at all, because (as far as I am aware) neither Gold nor ld64 (the two current consumers of libLTO) are supported on Windows.

Hi,

We use the libLTO library on windows for the linker and other binary
utilities we provide as part of the PS4 toolchain so this is very
important for us.

There was a lightning talk provided by Gao a couple of years ago. Here
are the slides if you are interested in learning more about it.

http://llvm.org/devmtg/2014-10/Slides/Gao-LTO-lightning-talk.pdf