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
In ELF and COFF an alias is just another offset in a section. There is no way
to represent an alias to something in another file.
In MachO, the spec has the N_INDR type which should allow for exactly that, but
is not currently implemented. Given that it is specified but not implemented,
we error in codegen to avoid miscompiling but don't reject aliases to
declarations in the verifier to leave the option open of implementing it.
In the past we have used alias to declarations as a way of implementing
weakref, which is why it exists in some old tests which this patch updates.
llvm-svn: 194705
Rafael Espindola