Precompiled XLA libraries

[peastman]

Building any program that uses XLA to perform calculations is currently very difficult. It has to be compiled in from source. It's incompatible with any build system other than Bazel. It's huge and takes a very long time to compile.

This could be made much easier by providing precompiled libraries that programs could link against. You could just download the version for your platform and point the compiler at the include and lib directories.

https://github.com/elixir-nx/xla has already done all the hard work of figuring out how to do this. Their libraries aren't generally useful, though, because they only include the features needed for EXLA. They don't even support the minimal JAX C++ example, because they're missing the tools directory. They also don't provide libraries for Windows.

Officially supported precompiled libraries that come directly from OpenXLA would do a lot to enable wider use of XLA. It would be a great benefit to the developer community.