Before this patch we had
@a = weak global ...
but
@b = alias weak ...
The patch changes aliases to look more like global variables.
Looking at some really old code suggests that the reason was that the old
bison based parser had a reduction for alias linkages and another one for
global variable linkages. Putting the alias first avoided the reduce/reduce
conflict.
The days of the old .ll parser are long gone. The new one parses just "linkage"
and a later check is responsible for deciding if a linkage is valid in a
given context.
llvm-svn: 214355
On ELF and COFF an alias is just another name for a position in the file.
There is no way to refer to a position in another file, so an alias to
undefined is meaningless.
MachO currently doesn't support aliases. The spec has a N_INDR, which when
implemented will have a different set of restrictions. Adding support for
it shouldn't be harder than any other IR extension.
For now, having the IR represent what is actually possible with current
tools makes it easier to fix the design of GlobalAlias.
llvm-svn: 203705
