The main goal of this commit is to make it easier to decouple codegen
from the linkers by being able to do LLVM codegen without going through
the `link.File`; however, this ended up being a nice refactor anyway.
Previously, every linker stored an optional `llvm.Object`, which was
populated when using LLVM for the ZCU *and* linking an output binary;
and `Zcu` also stored an optional `llvm.Object`, which was used only
when we needed LLVM for the ZCU (e.g. for `-femit-llvm-bc`) but were not
emitting a binary.
This situation was incredibly silly. It meant there were N+1 places the
LLVM object might be instead of just 1, and it meant that every linker
had to start a bunch of methods by checking for an LLVM object, and just
dispatching to the corresponding method on *it* instead if it was not
`null`.
Instead, we now always store the LLVM object on the `Zcu` -- which makes
sense, because it corresponds to the object emitted by, well, the Zig
Compilation Unit! The linkers now mostly don't make reference to LLVM.
`Compilation` makes sure to emit the LLVM object if necessary before
calling `flush`, so it is ready for the linker. Also, all of the
`link.File` methods which act on the ZCU -- like `updateNav` -- now
check for the LLVM object in `link.zig` instead of in every single
individual linker implementation. Notably, the change to LLVM emit
improves this rather ludicrous call chain in the `-fllvm -flld` case:
* Compilation.flush
* link.File.flush
* link.Elf.flush
* link.Elf.linkWithLLD
* link.Elf.flushModule
* link.emitLlvmObject
* Compilation.emitLlvmObject
* llvm.Object.emit
Replacing it with this one:
* Compilation.flush
* llvm.Object.emit
...although we do currently still end up in `link.Elf.linkWithLLD` to do
the actual linking. The logic for invoking LLD should probably also be
unified at least somewhat; I haven't done that in this commit.
3743c3e39cmlugg committed on 6/12/2025, 12:55:39 PMparent424e6ac