Low Level Virtual Machine 1.3 Released

RSpencer writes "The Low Level Virtual Machine project has released version 1.3. There are full release notes available. LLVM is a source-language agnostic toolkit for building compilers, optimizers, and jit or interpreted virtual machines. LLVM provides extensive optimization support, three mid-level IR formats (bytecode, assembly, and C++), three backend targets (x86,Sparc,PPC), full documentation, and a very simple and unique design. This new toolkit approach to compiler related tools is quickly attracting new developers who are making significant contributions to the work. Visit the home page where you can learn all the details. LLVM is funded by the National Science Foundation, MARCO/DARPA, and supported by UIUC's Computer Science department and other developers."

Comments

LLVM Progress

[sabre]

LLVM is an active and vital project with a growing user base and active developer community. If you'd like to chat with some of the devs, stop in to the irc channel.

LLVM is a very young project (only 3 years old) but has already made dramatic progress in it's time. Check out the status updates on the left hand side of the main site to see the rate of progress.

Building a full C/C++ compiler is no small feat!

-Chris

YAVM?

[RAMMS EIN]

So...now we have various implementations of the Java VM, the .NET VM, Parrot, and LLVM, plus various emulators of real machines, and let's not forget the real machines themselves.

What I would like to know is how they all compare. How fast does a typical program run? How portable is the implementation; how easy can the bytecode be transformed to native code for various architectures? How easy is it to target this machine? How well does the machine cope with various programming languages (esp. Common LISP)? How stable (backward compatible) is the bytecode? What are the licensing terms? Does it communicate with the host system, and how well? Etc...

Speaking as a GCC maintainer, I call bullshit

[devphil]

The very best trolls always start with a grain of truth. (LLVM is much easier to understand than GCC. The GCC infrastructure is very baroque, dating from a time when assuming the presence of an ANSI C bootstrap compiler was too much. One of the major LLVM guys has presented his toolchain work at the annual GCC Summit, and maintains close communication with the rest of the GCC team -- and we wish him well. All very true; no GCC hacker would say any less.)

The trolls then move on into wild exaggerations and complete lies. Such as:

and try their damnedest to obscure and change the programming API from release to release.

Pure malicious bullshit. RMS doesn't want proprietary backends to be able to read the GCC IR, and so we don't ever write it out in a machine-readable format. But we've never gone out of our way to obfuscate the internal API.

GCC recently voted down using C++ in their core code.

Again, a complete lie. We asked RMS whether we could make use of C++ in parts of the compiler. While a skilled and brilliant C and LISP hacker, RMS is a reactionary fuckhead when it comes to anything other than C or LISP. In his opinion, all GNU programs should be written in C, and only C, ever.

There was no vote.