On 8/22/06, John Siracusa <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Has anyone looked at LLVM lately?
Yes, actually, I was looking at it just the other day. I couldn't get it to build on x86-64, but I talked to some of the developers over in their IRC channel, and they told me that this would be forthcoming (in two weeks or so), so I'm going to hold off for a while and then try it then. On the other hand, Parrot built quite nicely on x86-64, although I think I like the 32-bit build (which also built just fine, albeit without ICU) better due to the excellent JIT support. http://llvm.org/
It seems to be making a lot of progress lately with the support of Apple (which is using LLVM for its own purposes in Mac OS X). Is there anything there Parrot can steal? Would it make sense for Parrot to target LLVM bytecode and let LLVM do further optimization and native code generation?
I don't know that there'd be much benefit in directly targeting LLVM, but I do know that it'd be a lot easier to just try using one of their gcc front-ends to compile parrot. Maybe I'll try that out in a few weeks, provided that the x86-64 support is there. There's also the predictably named HLVM:
http://hlvm.org/
Now that looks interesting, if totally pre-alpha; thanks for mentioning it! which looks vaguely Parrot-ish. Check out the comparison chart:
http://hlvm.org/docs/FAQ.html Anyway, I'm just thinking out loud, here. Sorry if it's all old news to the Parrot dev gurus.
It probably is, and I'm no guru, but as projects change and develop, I don't think it hurts to compare and re-evaluate now and then. :) -John
-- Peter
