[embedded] Add a frontend flag to drop all code from a module and emit an empty object file #72669
Add this suggestion to a batch that can be applied as a single commit.
This suggestion is invalid because no changes were made to the code.
Suggestions cannot be applied while the pull request is closed.
Suggestions cannot be applied while viewing a subset of changes.
Only one suggestion per line can be applied in a batch.
Add this suggestion to a batch that can be applied as a single commit.
Applying suggestions on deleted lines is not supported.
You must change the existing code in this line in order to create a valid suggestion.
Outdated suggestions cannot be applied.
This suggestion has been applied or marked resolved.
Suggestions cannot be applied from pending reviews.
Suggestions cannot be applied on multi-line comments.
Suggestions cannot be applied while the pull request is queued to merge.
Suggestion cannot be applied right now. Please check back later.
Motivation: In Embedded Swift, we don't want to emit actual code for libraries, we only serialize them and clients only need the serialized .swiftmodule. But sometimes it's useful to still have some .o file for a library, because it simplifies the build system story significantly, and various build systems can still operate on a "normal" dependency graph. For that, let's add a flag that makes the compiler emit an empty object file, to be used in situations where a build system really needs some .o output.
I don't expect this flag to be useful when running manual compile commands (e.g. in a Makefile) -- users should simply avoid asking the compiler to generate a .o file in the first place.
Also note we should consider this to be a stop-gap, until we flesh out the story of how libraries/modules are supposed to build in Embedded Swift.