Imports in llgo, jr.

So I realised I'm a doofus the other day, when I started getting closer to completion on producing export metadata in llgo. Rolling my own import mechanism is unnecessary for now. Instead, I can just lean on the import mechanism that exists in the standard library (well, until Go 1 at least): go/types/GcImporter.

I've modified llgo to use go/ast/NewPackage, rather than the old code I had that was using go/parser/ParseFiles. The NewPackage function takes an optional "importer" object which will be used for inter-package dependency resolution, whereas ParseFiles does no resolution. The standard GcImporter type may be used to identify exports by interrogating the object and archive files in $GOROOT. The AST that's generated is filled in with external declarations, so it's then up to llgo to convert those into LLVM external declarations. Easy peasy.

Now it's time to come up with a symbol naming scheme. Without having thought about it too hard, I'm going to start off with the assumption that the absolute name of the symbol (package+name), with slashes converted to dots, will do the trick. Once I've implemented that, I'll need to start work on the runtime in earnest. It's also high time I put some automated tests in place, since things are starting to get a little stabler.

In the long term I'll probably want to continue on with my original plan, which is to generate module-level metadata in the LLVM bitcode, and then extract this in a custom importer. It should be quite straightforward. Earlier this week I wrapped up some updates to gollvm to add an API to make generating source-level debugging metadata simpler. This will be useful not only for describing exports, but also for what it's intended: generating DWARF debug information.

In other news: my wife just ordered the 1-4a box set of The Art of Computer Programming for me. At the moment I am slowly making way through Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, and so far, so good. Looking forward to more light reading for the bus/train!