Re: What's lacking: a good intermediate form

Tony wrote:
> I didn't reject LLVM. I was recently at the project website and got
> the impression that their goals will not be achieved for many
> years. Vaporware?


In fact LLVM is here now, and being used in production. Version
2.5 was released just a few days ago, which should tell you something.
We are using LLVM to compile C to a customizable VLIW-like architecture.


> Again though, because LLVM project goals are so lofty, it may not be
> available in my lifetime.


In an earlier post you wrote "The LLVM project seems to be hampered by
the lofty goal of being able to compile every beastly-to-implement
language out there (or at least the most beastly one: C++)."


I don't know where you got the impression that this is the goal of the
LLVM project. The LLVM project is in fact to a large degree agnostic
about the source language being compiled. The LLVM IR is based on a
simple risc-style virtual machine, with a few higher level operations
like aggregate value access and subprogram call. The LLVM project
consists of the IR, optimization passes that operate on the IR,
and a number of backends for native code generation.


There are a few frontends for LLVM. I guess most people use llvm-gcc,
which is a modified gcc targeting the LLVM IR, but there is also
the clang frontend, and some more esoteric stuff if you look at
the projects page at the LLVM website. But all these are projects
*using* LLVM, not part of the LLVM project.
--
Pertti

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