[gambit-list] A couple of random questions

mikel evins mevins at me.com
Sun Jul 31 19:20:15 EDT 2011


On Jul 31, 2011, at 5:14 PM, Marc Feeley wrote:

[…further instructions gratefully received…]

Thanks, Marc; I'll give it a go.

> I wonder why Apple is moving to LLVM gcc.  I've read somewhere that Apple thinks gcc is more buggy than LLVM gcc, and that it generates better code.  At least for compiling Gambit, this seems to be a mistaken belief on both counts.

Apple has spent a bunch of labor and money on LLVM. They and some of their third-party developers say that LLVM generally compiles faster than GCC and is better able to provide more helpful and revealing error messages. At least some people are also claiming improvements in generated code for at least some scenarios (Apple is not the only batch of people making this claim; the guys working on the GHC LLVM back end also say that in at least some scenarios they get better-performing code generated by LLVM).

Of course, even if I've remembered all this stuff accurately, and even if it's all true, that doesn't mean LLVM is bug-free. The Gambit sources could still tickle LLVM bugs that others are not seeing--or could interact in some other unfortunate way with the back end. There are a lot of code paths through anything that can compile C, C++, and Objective-C :-).

Thanks again for the help; if you don't hear from me again right away, that's probably a good sign. 

:-)

--me




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