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Add space-friendly arguments #1509

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Add 0000-space-friendly-arguments.md
Zoxc Feb 23, 2016
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- Feature Name: Space-friendly arguments
- Start Date: 2016-02-23
- RFC PR: (leave this empty)
- Rust Issue: (leave this empty)

# Summary
[summary]: #summary

Add `-C link-arg` and `-C llvm-arg` command line arguments which correspond to `-C link-args` and `-C llvm-args` but takes a single argument which accepts spaces.

# Motivation
[motivation]: #motivation

It is common to pass paths to the linker. Paths may contain spaces and so `-C link-args` is insufficient for this. MSVC's linker also has [atleast one argument which require spaces](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ew0y5khy.aspx).
This would also fix [#30947](https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/30947).
We don't control what arguments the linker or LLVM accepts so we shouldn't limit them to not use spaces.

# Detailed design
[design]: #detailed-design

We add two new arguments `-C link-arg` and `-C llvm-arg` which can be used multiple times and combined with the old `-C link-args` and `-C llvm-args`. The value passed to them represent a single argument to be passed to the linker or LLVM respectively. The order of the arguments should be preserved when passing them on.
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Is there a motivating use case for adding -C llvm-arg for now? It's somewhat unfortunate that we stabilized -C llvm-args at all in the first place, and I wouldn't personally be eager to continue stabilizing avenues to pass arguments to LLVM.

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I don't know of a use case for that, but there are arguments that take paths in LLVM.

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It may be best to err on the side of being conservative in that case and avoid adding it for now.

This design corresponds to clang's with `-Xlinker <val>` and `-mllvm <val>`.

# Drawbacks
[drawbacks]: #drawbacks

This results in multiple ways to pass on arguments (without spaces) to the linker and LLVM.
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RFCs tend to have some discussion of drawbacks instead of just listing them. For example why is this an acceptable drawback? Can we take steps to mitigate this drawback? Are there reasons those steps are not currently worth it but may eventually become worth it?


# Alternatives
[alternatives]: #alternatives

None.
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I think saying that there are no alternatives may be a bit disingenuous here. One possible alternative would be to invent some form of syntax which allows spaces to be escaped. A drawback of the alternative is that it is not strictly backwards compatible, but it is likely in practice compatible so that may not matter.


# Unresolved questions
[unresolved]: #unresolved-questions

None.