On Jun 4, 2009, at 3:20 AM, Steven Bosscher wrote:
On Thu, Jun 4, 2009 at 12:14 PM, Rafael Espindola <espind...@google.com
> wrote:
I'd love to see this, but I can't contribute to it directly. I
think the
plugin interfaces would need small extensions, but there are no
specific
technical issues preventing it from happening. LLVM has certainly
progressed a lot since that (really old) email went out :)
I can help a bit.
Aren't LLVM and GCC doing just fine as
competing compilers?
I'm not sure what you mean, LLVM and GCC are two completely different
things. LLVM is an infrastructure for building compilers, GCC is an
instance of a compiler. Combining LLVM with GCC gives LLVM-GCC
(another instance of a compiler), which adds new capabilities to GCC
that many users find useful. These include things such as cross-
language LTO support (for C, c++, fortran, etc), JIT compilation,
better performance in some scenarios, etc.
Excuse me if this is a stupid question, but eh -- why would you want
to make an LLVM plugin?
There are multiple answers to this question. The most obvious one is
that the current version of llvm-gcc is stuck on GCC 4.2, and 4.2
lacks a number of improvements the fortran and ada front-ends and
runtimes. It would be straight-forward to forward port the patches to
gcc mainline, but presumably implementing llvm-gcc in terms of plugins
would result in something that has easier maintenance (this remains to
be seen of course).
-Chris
