On Mon, Sep 22, 2008 at 8:19 PM, Marc Feeley feeley@iro.umontreal.ca wrote:
I haven't looked at LLVM since its first release, and following your post I took a new look
As have I. I am glad of the reminder.
For fun I tried compiling Gambit with llvm-gcc on my Mac OS X machine
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The good news is that this works
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The bad news is that the compile time is really high (10 minutes for some of the larger C files like lib/_num.c and lib/_io.c) and the execution speed if often lower than when using the standard gcc.
Well a custom back-end would be using Gambit's high-level optimizations and LLVM's low-level ones. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the use of C as an intermediate language (however stylized) introduces inefficiencies.
If anyone is interested in contributing to implement an LLVM back-end for Gambit, please send me an email. I can guide you through the steps required.
I am indirectly interested, and may become actively so depending on what happens in the next couple of months (waiting on funding :) Please keep the list posted if anyone steps up.
david rush