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Currently, `rustc` generates nondeterministic archives, which contain system timestamps. These don't really serve any useful purpose, and enabling deterministic archives moves us a little closer to completely deterministic builds. For a small toy library using `std::ops::{Deref,DerefMut}`, this change actually results in a bit-for-bit identical build every time.
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We have previously always relied upon an external tool, `ar`, to modify archives
that the compiler produces (staticlibs, rlibs, etc). This approach, however, has
a number of downsides:
* Spawning a process is relatively expensive for small compilations
* Encoding arguments across process boundaries often incurs unnecessary overhead
or lossiness. For example `ar` has a tough time dealing with files that have
the same name in archives, and the compiler copies many files around to ensure
they can be passed to `ar` in a reasonable fashion.
* Most `ar` programs found do **not** have the ability to target arbitrary
platforms, so this is an extra tool which needs to be found/specified when
cross compiling.
The LLVM project has had a tool called `llvm-ar` for quite some time now, but it
wasn't available in the standard LLVM libraries (it was just a standalone
program). Recently, however, in LLVM 3.7, this functionality has been moved to a
library and is now accessible by consumers of LLVM via the `writeArchive`
function.
This commit migrates our archive bindings to no longer invoke `ar` by default
but instead make a library call to LLVM to do various operations. This solves
all of the downsides listed above:
* Archive management is now much faster, for example creating a "hello world"
staticlib is now 6x faster (50ms => 8ms). Linking dynamic libraries also
recently started requiring modification of rlibs, and linking a hello world
dynamic library is now 2x faster.
* The compiler is now one step closer to "hassle free" cross compilation because
no external tool is needed for managing archives, LLVM does the right thing!
This commit does not remove support for calling a system `ar` utility currently.
We will continue to maintain compatibility with LLVM 3.5 and 3.6 looking forward
(so the system LLVM can be used wherever possible), and in these cases we must
shell out to a system utility. All nightly builds of Rust, however, will stop
needing a system `ar`.
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