LLVM ist a mess

Posted Mar 18, 2024 12:43 UTC (Mon) by intelfx (subscriber, #130118)
In reply to: LLVM ist a mess by DemiMarie
Parent article: Cranelift code generation comes to Rust

> If each user of LLVM bundled it, these problems would go away

Ah yes. I believe it is time for a revised version of the "layers of abstraction" maxim: every releng problem may be solved by pinning and bundling, except for the problem of too much pinning and bundling.

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LLVM ist a mess

Posted Mar 18, 2024 23:49 UTC (Mon) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link] (3 responses)

Meh, just use block-layer deduplication and/or a content-addressed filesystem, and then all of the logical duplication works out to relatively little physical duplication.

LLVM ist a mess

Posted Mar 19, 2024 12:24 UTC (Tue) by intelfx (subscriber, #130118) [Link] (1 responses)

This could only have a _chance_ of working as intended if either 1) everyone was pinning and bundling from the same blessed set of binary artifacts, or 2) every such project's build output was bit-for-bit reproducible (and if no one ever used different compiler flags or versions).

I think it's safe to say that the real world is very far from achieving either scenario.

LLVM ist a mess

Posted Mar 19, 2024 18:11 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

> 2) every such project's build output was bit-for-bit reproducible (and if no one ever used different compiler flags or versions).

That's actually how Nix works (compiler flags and environment are also a part of the content's hash). Some newer languages like Go also have this baked into the module system.

LLVM ist a mess

Posted Mar 19, 2024 12:28 UTC (Tue) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

Unless some header has even a slightly different length between one object file and another, and then every block has different contents, despite (say) 99+% of the content being the same.