This format is simply a regular object file with the bitcode stored in a
section named ".llvmbc", plus any number of other (non-allocated) sections.
One immediate use case for this is to accommodate compilation processes
which expect the object file to contain metadata in non-allocated sections,
such as the ".go_export" section used by some Go compilers [1], although I
imagine that in the future we could consider compiling parts of the module
(such as large non-inlinable functions) directly into the object file to
improve LTO efficiency.
[1] http://golang.org/doc/install/gccgo#Imports
Differential Revision: http://reviews.llvm.org/D4371
llvm-svn: 218078
