Reverting of #2004 and #1457 (Configure.pl --cxx)

[Christoph Otto]

On 03/28/2011 06:16 PM, Vasily Chekalkin wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 29, 2011 at 10:36 AM, Andrew Whitworth
> <wknight8111 at gmail.com>  wrote:
>> On Mon, Mar 28, 2011 at 7:26 PM, Vasily Chekalkin<bacek at bacek.com>  wrote:
>>> We can ask. But it will mean that we'll be blocked on our side until
>>> after "extended LLVM C API" will be developed. Do we want to wait for
>>> about 1 year before getting anything useful?
>>
>> We should still ask for them to improve the API.
>>
>> Could we create an extension project which adds a proper C wrapper
>> around LLVM for use with Parrot? That way we can write the wrappers we
>> need with C++, but leave the normal Parrot build unaffected.
>
> Yes. It's definitely possible:
>
> 1.  Create new project.
> 2. Setup build infrastructure. Based on autotools/scons/cmake because
> it should be cross-platform.
> 3. Setup installation.
> 4. Create packages for Debian/RedHat/YouNameIt because it's independent project.
> 5. Use it in Parrot for build LLVM JIT.
>
> Comparing to:
> 1. Revert few commits.
> 2. Implement LLVM JIT.
>
> Sorry, it's way too complex from my point of view.
>
> OTOH, I don't mind to pass our "LLVM C API extensions" back to
> upstream. However Python's LLVM binding author didn't receive any
> response from LLVM for his request (which is quite similar to what I
> want to implement).
>

Let's revert the --cxx=... removal.  It was taken out because it wasn't used 
by anything after we stopped bundling icu.  Now that there's a use, there's a 
reason for it to exist again.

Christoph