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I was already getting a bad feeling about LLVM recently, and this thread kind of cements that. Everybody seems to have a different (sometimes radically differe
by nknight 15y ago
I was already getting a bad feeling about LLVM recently, and this thread kind of cements that.
Everybody seems to have a different (sometimes radically different) idea of what LLVM is for. That can't be good for making progress, and it's definitely not good for guys like me wondering if LLVM is a sane choice for a project.
- bsiemon 15y agoLLVM is a square peg. If your project needs a square shaped peg then it will do amazing things for you. On the other hand if you want it to do circle shaped things you will feel the pain.
- nknight 15y agoThanks for the fortune-cookie wisdom. That tells no one anything. We don't have square pegs or round holes, we have complex engineering problems to solve, and LLVM's complex shape is obscured by a community that doesn't agree on its shape, so we have no way to tell if it fits our holes.
- oopsdude 15y agoSo you shoot down his "fortune-cookie wisdom", and correct him with the same type of analogy. Was the bile necessary?
- eliben 15y agoDon't take it too far. For purposes it was designed to serve, LLVM is great, best in its class. If your project is something that could benefit from LLVM, then by all means use it. If it isn't, then don't. As simple as that. Many corporations (most of all Apple) bet millions of $$$s in resources on projects that depend on LLVM, so don't worry too much.
- chc 15y agoI don't see any disagreement along those lines in the thread under discussion here. The LLVM project is quite clear (it says so on its homepage!) that it is not making a typical virtual machine along the lines of the JVM. What are you talking about? This sounds like completely random and out-of-context FUD.
- nknight 15y agoAnd yet it says it might be used to build such, and this thread contains disagreement amongst the developers of the original purposes and the meaning of "virtual machine". I'm just a developer who has looked into LLVM in the recent past for possible use in cross-platform projects and come away more confused than enlightened, and this thread just magnified it. Interpreting that as "FUD" is wildly unhelpful.
- dhume 15y agoAre you trying to make a compiler that targets multiple platforms?
- nknight 15y agoIn a sense. I was after a bytecode that had a JIT for the more common platforms (e.g. x86, ARM, possibly MIPS), could be extended for new ones without massive effort (even if sub-optimally), and had reasonable facilities for hooking into native code, and I was trying to avoid the complex baggage, legacy or otherwise, of a JVM. LLVM initially looked like a candidate, but I walked away with conflicting ideas about whether it was even intended to be suitable for such a case, much less whether it actually was.