RFR: 8326587: Separate out Microsoft toolchain linking

[Julian Waters]

On Sat, 24 Feb 2024 10:00:21 GMT, Magnus Ihse Bursie <ihse at openjdk.org> wrote:

>>> And then I think this will actually help Julian, since we'll push the microsoft strangeness away in a separate file
>> 
>> Thanks! Though I do first need to rebase on top of it and fix all the merge conflicts first...
>> (Thinking about it, this likely means I have to excise some of the Microsoft linking logic out into the "regular" linking file since some of the Microsoft linking process is used by Windows linking in general, even with the gcc toolchain)
>> 
>> Just a comment: Why not reuse the AR variable for lib rather than introduce an entirely new LIB variable? The logic treating lib.exe as ar is gone with this change, but that doesn't mean they have to be split into entirely different variables. LinkMicrosoft could just run $($1_AR) without treating it as ar. This saves one autoconf and Makefile variable
>
>> Why not reuse the AR variable for lib rather than introduce an entirely new LIB variable? 
> 
> The reason will become more apparent as I progress towards proper handling of static libs. In short, AR is not by far a 1-to-1 mapping with LIB. On non-Microsoft toolchains, we are basically going to do static linking by ld + objcopy + ar; on Windows, it's just lib. So there is nothing to be gained by pretending that lib is ar.

> @magicus This pull request has not yet been marked as ready for integration.

That last second save is nothing short of impressive haha

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PR Comment: https://git.openjdk.org/jdk/pull/17987#issuecomment-1963966880