It feels so suboptimal to need the C toolchain to do things, but having no solid way to depend on it as a non-C library (especially annoying in Rust, which insists on building everything from source and never installing libraries globally).

I make a tool/library that requires the C toolchain at runtime. That's even worse than build time, I need end users to have things like lld, objdump, ranlib, etc installed anywhere they use it. My options are essentially:

- Requiring users to just figure it out with their system package manager

- Building the C toolchain from source at build time and statically linking it (so you get to spend an hour or two recompiling all of LLVM each time you update or clear your package cache! Awesome!),

- Building just LLD/objdump/.. at build-time (but user still need to install LLVM. So you get both slow installs AND have to deal with finding a compatible copy of libLLVM),

- Pre-compiling all the C tools and putting them in a storage bucket somewhere, for all architectures and all OS versions. But then not have support when things like the M1 or new OS versions right away, or people on uncommon OSes. And now need to maintain a build machine for all of these myself.

- Pre-compile the whole C toolchain to WASM, build Wasmtime from source instead, and just eat the cost of Cranelift running LLVM 5-10x slower than natively...

I keep trying to work around the C toolchain, but I still can't see any very good solution that doesn't make my users have extra problems one way or another.

Hey RiiR evangelism people, anyone want to tackle all of LLVM? .. no? No one? :)