This post is from Chris Lattner, LLVM lead developer and now head of
Apple's LLVM team. The compiler he is talking about is gcc-llvm,
which uses the scanner and parser from GCC and the code generation
from LLVM.
For various reasons (licensing, ability to use the code in other
projects, compilation speed, NIH), Apple have since started the clang
project, which aims to produce a C/C++/Objective-C scanner and parser.
This is then transformed into an AST which is transformed into LLVM
IR, which can then be compiled to native code (or interpreted). The
current status of clang is that C parsing and code generation is
pretty much finished, as is Objective-C parsing. I have started
working on code generation for Objective-C, and there are other people
working on C++.
For me, the big advantage of LLVM is made obvious by the way in which
the GSLS implementation on OS X works. To implement a Smalltalk
compiler on LLVM and an Objective-C runtime you would need a Smalltalk
parser (trivial), something that generates LLVM IR message sends (I've
already written this for the GNU runtime) and an Objective-C
implementation of a few core classes, like BlockClosure. You then get
something like StepTalk but compiled to native speed with runtime
optimisations in significantly less code (and can add languages like
Self or Io fairly easily). Note that these would be first-class
GNUstep development languages, not simply scripting languages. For
this reason, I am keeping the runtime-specific bits of the code
generation free of clang-specific code. They only use pure LLVM
constructs and so can be easily reused elsewhere.
David
On 1 Mar 2008, at 08:03, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
As usual, world isn't white or black:
There was/is a proposal to integrate LLVM into gcc and this message
also addresses some of the licence issues.
http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2005-11/msg00888.html
He reports a LLVM based compiler that is command-line compatible to
gcc. I don't know anything about the status though.
Nikolaus
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