Typical uses of ThinLTO don't have any use for this as a standalone
file, but distributed ThinLTO uses this to make the linker phase more
efficient. With clang you'd do something like `clang -flto=thin
-fthin-link-bitcode=foo.indexing.o -c foo.c` and then get both foo.o
(full of bitcode) and foo.indexing.o (just the summary or index part of
the bitcode). That's then usable by a two-stage linking process that's
more friendly to distributed build systems like bazel, which is why I'm
working on this area.
I talked some to @teresajohnson about naming in this area, as things
seem to be a little confused between various blog posts and build
systems. "bitcode index" and "bitcode summary" tend to be a little too
ambiguous, and she tends to use "thin link bitcode" and "minimized
bitcode" (which matches the descriptions in LLVM). Since the clang
option is thin-link-bitcode, I went with that to try and not add a new
spelling in the world.
Per @dtolnay, you can work around the lack of this by using `lld
--thinlto-index-only` to do the indexing on regular .o files of
bitcode, but that is a bit wasteful on actions when we already have all
the information in rustc and could just write out the matching minimized
bitcode. I didn't test that at all in our infrastructure, because by the
time I learned that I already had this patch largely written.
On dev-desktop the advantage of cg_clif over cg_llvm on simple-raytracer
is 15% when parallel rustc is disabled. With -Zthreads=16 the advantage
goes from 5% to 22% with this change.
`-Z debug-macros` is "stabilized" by enabling it by default and removing.
`-Z collapse-macro-debuginfo` is stabilized as `-C collapse-macro-debuginfo`.
It now supports all typical boolean values (`parse_opt_bool`) in addition to just yes/no.
Default value of `collapse_debuginfo` was changed from `false` to `external` (i.e. collapsed if external, not collapsed if local).
`#[collapse_debuginfo]` attribute without a value is no longer supported to avoid guessing the default.
