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Speaking of LLVM's "modular" architecture ; LLVM's architecture is so modular that projects like the Rust compiler or Emscripten use their own modified forks of

by Ace17 11y ago

Speaking of LLVM's "modular" architecture ; LLVM's architecture is so modular that projects like the Rust compiler or Emscripten use their own modified forks of the LLVM tree ... What's the point in being "modular", if you can't add a backend nor a frontend without having to clone-and-modify the whole LLVM tree? (And what if I want to compile Rust to Javascript? Which of these incompatible LLVM branches should I use?)

sanxiyn 11y ago
Rust does work with LLVM releases. In the past it didn't because of various bugs in LLVM, but all blocking bug fixes landed, where "blocking" is defined as those preventing compiler bootstrap. Currently, Rust CI checks for every commit that it bootstraps with LLVM 3.7 branch. Rust maintains the fork because in the foreseeable future, there will be non-blocking bug fixes and Rust will not follow LLVM trunk to get them.