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LLVM 8.0 Released With Cascade Lake Support, Better Diagnostics, More OpenMP/OpenCL (phoronix.com)

Posted by msmash on from the it's-here dept.

After being delayed for the better part of one month, LLVM 8.0 officially is finally available. From a report: LLVM release manager Hans Wennborg announced the release a few minutes ago and summed up this half-year update to LLVM and its sub-project as: "speculative load hardening, concurrent compilation in the ORC JIT API, no longer experimental WebAssembly target, a Clang option to initialize automatic variables, improved pre-compiled header support in clang-cl, the /Zc:dllexportInlines- flag, RISC-V support in lld. And as usual, many bug fixes, optimization and diagnostics improvements, etc."

4 of 36 comments (clear)

  1. Wondered what WebAssembly was... by SuperKendall · · Score: 2, Informative

    I was curious what WebAssembly was, so I hunted down an FAQ.

    Summary is that WebAssembly is a binary format to use in place of Javascript, to avoid parsing time.

    Really happy to see LLVM carry on, what a great project!

    --
    "There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
    1. Re:Wondered what WebAssembly was... by tlhIngan · · Score: 2

      Really happy to see LLVM carry on, what a great project!

      Well, that's because they've got a lot of rich sponsors - Apple, Qualcomm, etc. Basically what happened was GPLv3 and Apple spent a ton of money investing in alternative free compiler suites, of which LLVM was the most complete and well structured alternative. (That's why Clang is credited to Apple).

      Of course, the favorable licensing terms of LLVM didn't hurt, either (I think it's MIT or BSD?).

      So the fact it's easy to integrate into practically everything (IDEs and other things), has a good license, etc., has basically exploded its popularity. It's used in everything from the Xcode IDE where its code parsing engine helps syntax and error highlighting (as well as dynamic recompilation as you fix the error), but drivers needing to compile OpenCL or other code down to GPU native machine code.

      WebAssembly is what makes possible projects like DOSbox that runs in a browser (see Internet Archive for demos) as well as many other things that run in a browser that were formerly C programs.

  2. The orc and the elf by cerberusss · · Score: 2

    concurrent compilation in the ORC JIT API

    Finally. For years, we've had ELFs in our binaries and I'm very happy that ORCs now have their own API.

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    8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
  3. Define terms like a real tech news website by iggymanz · · Score: 4, Informative

    LLVM is a set of compiler toolchain components, it is used to provide the middle tier of a compiler system for many languages. It's written in C++