If we don't do this, some versions of LLVM (at least 17, experimentally)
will double-emit some error messages, which is how I noticed this. Given
that it seems to be costing some extra work, let's only request the
summary bitcode production if we'll actually bother writing it down,
otherwise skip it.
Typical uses of ThinLTO don't have any use for this as a standalone
file, but distributed ThinLTO uses this to make the linker phase more
efficient. With clang you'd do something like `clang -flto=thin
-fthin-link-bitcode=foo.indexing.o -c foo.c` and then get both foo.o
(full of bitcode) and foo.indexing.o (just the summary or index part of
the bitcode). That's then usable by a two-stage linking process that's
more friendly to distributed build systems like bazel, which is why I'm
working on this area.
I talked some to @teresajohnson about naming in this area, as things
seem to be a little confused between various blog posts and build
systems. "bitcode index" and "bitcode summary" tend to be a little too
ambiguous, and she tends to use "thin link bitcode" and "minimized
bitcode" (which matches the descriptions in LLVM). Since the clang
option is thin-link-bitcode, I went with that to try and not add a new
spelling in the world.
Per @dtolnay, you can work around the lack of this by using `lld
--thinlto-index-only` to do the indexing on regular .o files of
bitcode, but that is a bit wasteful on actions when we already have all
the information in rustc and could just write out the matching minimized
bitcode. I didn't test that at all in our infrastructure, because by the
time I learned that I already had this patch largely written.
LLVM has a neat [statistics] feature that tracks how often optimizations kick
in. It's very handy for optimization work. Since we expose the LLVM pass
timings, I thought it made sense to expose the LLVM statistics too.
[statistics]: https://llvm.org/docs/ProgrammersManual.html#the-statistic-class-stats-option
