Automatic linking of extern mods is not effective

[brson]

// This tries to link to a library called foo
extern mod foo { }

I believe that I override the automatic linkage more often than not, sometimes even inserting bogus extern mods just to have a place to stuff linker arguments

#[nolink]
#[link_args = "-lwhatever"]
extern mod foo { }

Perhaps we can remove the automatic linking behavior and replace it with a richer set of linker attributes that can be specified either on extern mods or the crate as appropriate. There are quite a lot of bindings out there now, so we can look through them for use cases.

[brson]

It's a shame that our link attribute is dedicated to specifying linkage metadata.

[brson]

Maybe extern mod is going away completely in favor of extern blocks.

[graydon]

Yeah, I think extern blocks + some finer-grained linkage attributes crafted to be either platform-and-linker-neutral or configurable by target might be a way forward.

[brson]

There have been some additional wrinkles lately. rustc now tries to propagate link args to downsteam crates, I believe in quite an ad-hoc way, filtering arguments it thinks won't work correctly.

[brson]

Link names are no longer derived automatically now that there are no extern mods. There's more design to do with foreign linkage but maybe this specific issue can close.

[brson]

Closing.