No header files?

[Denis Koroskin]

On Thu, 22 Oct 2009 19:59:04 +0400, Yigal Chripun <yigal100 at gmail.com>  
wrote:

> Tomas Lindquist Olsen Wrote:
>>
>> This locks D to the LLVM backend, things like that is never a good idea.
>>
>
> you could say the same thing about .net and Java -
> Java locks you to .class files and .net locks you to assemblies.
> there are many JVMs from different vendors for different platforms which  
> are interoperable because of this. IIRC Mono can work with MS assemblies  
> and also there's the interoperability between different .net languages.
>
>> Also, LLVM bitcode files produced both by LDC and Clang/llvm-gcc are
>> platform specific. Sure you can process them on any platform, but the
>> source code they were compiled from was platform specific, and so is
>> the resulting bitcode. Using LLVM bitcode as a replacement format for
>> native OMF/COFF/ELF objects, does not give us platform neutrality.
>>
>
> I don't know llvm that well but it seems that for clang/llvm-gcc the  
> reason for this is because of the source language (c/c++) which is  
> platform specific. Can you elaborate about this for LDC? where are the  
> problematic parts and what can be done to make the output  
> platform-neutral?
>
> I read that platform specific things like sizeof where hardcoded in the  
> resulting bit-code but now they replaced it with a sizeof intrinsic so  
> that the resulting bit-code would not depend on this. are there any  
> other problematic cases like this still remaining?
>
>> -Tomas
>

D source code:

void main()
{
     version (Windows) {
         writefln("Windows");
     } else {
         writefln("not Windows");
     }
}

Using the same LLVM IR for both platforms would be a mistake in the case  
above.

The only solution would be to carry version and such stuff in IR, too, and  
resolve at later stages, but this is also problematic.