4 ms·

Off topic suggestion: When you have a home page for a project, if the name is an acronym, you should spell out the acronym in the first paragraph, if not the fi

Off topic suggestion: When you have a home page for a project, if the name is an acronym, you should spell out the acronym in the first paragraph, if not the first sentence or the title. From http://llvm.org/ http://llvm.org/ I looked at Overview, Features, Documentation and FAQ, and did not find the definition of LLVM. I ultimately had to go to Wikipedia.

waitwhat 15y ago
And because you didn't post it either, I had to go to wikipedia as well: Low-Level Virtual Machine.
- exDM69 15y ago
  The problem with "Low-Level Virtual Machine" is that it gives a very wrong view of what LLVM actually is (because a "virtual machine" is associated with JVM and similar tools). That full name is not even used a whole lot any more, people refer to LLVM as LLVM which means the umbrella project under which a lot of subprojects exist.
bronxbomber92 15y ago
File a bug. http://llvm.org/bugs/ http://llvm.org/bugs/ :)
- sixtofour 15y ago
  http://llvm.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=11467 http://llvm.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=11467
  - exDM69 15y ago
    Oh no you didn't. If you did, you should have at least made the change yourself (IIRC the LLVM website is in their source repositories in SVN or Git) and posted it as a part of your bug report. The LLVM developers are experts in compilers, I'd much more prefer them spending time writing compilers than fixing little things on the web site.
exDM69 15y ago
edit: LLVM once stood for "Low level virtual machine", but that is no longer the meaning. The early name comes from Chris Lattner's research paper describing an "ideal machine language", an intermediate language for compilers which is a little like an Assembly -type language for a virtual machine with infinite registers. The first sentence on the front page of llvm.org pretty much sums it up: "The LLVM Project is a collection of modular and reusable compiler and toolchain technologies." It may not be the clearest LLVM description out there, but that's pretty much what it is. If the description had more detail, it would not fit in one sentence. The hard thing about describing LLVM is that it's a huge complicated project in a domain that's outside even many professional programmers' domain. I tend to say that LLVM is (to me) a "compiler infrastructure", because I use it to build compiler back ends. However, LLVM is so much more than that, as the project includes loosely coupled tools ranging from complete compilers (clang) to debuggers (lldb) to byte code and binary format introspection utilities (llvm's binutils counterparts). So a "compiler infrastructure" or any other dumbed down explanation wouldn't do it justice. That's why the first sentence on the front page is actually pretty good.
- sixtofour 15y ago
  "if the name is an acronym, you should spell out the acronym" (I did not downvote you BTW) Someone else replied that the project is now just referred to as LLVM. That's fine, but people expect acronyms to stand for something, and the definition or lack of should be way at the top of any project. Lots of people come to a project for the first time and aren't in the know.
  - exDM69 15y ago
    Sorry, missed the acronym part. Anyway, spelling out the acronym only creates more confusion. I don't understand the downvotes, if you downvoted, please tell why. I tried to be sensible in explaining what LLVM is and why it's hard to explain. And why it's no longer an acronym.
    - lukesandberg 15y ago
      pedantic: LLVM is not an acronym, it is an initialism. An acronym is when the abbreviated letters spell something pronounceable as a word (GNU, NATO, SCUBA, PATRIOT act...) an initialism is just an abbreviation using the first letter of every word in the abbreviated name or phrase. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acronym_and_initialism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acronym_and_initialism
jstepien 15y ago
As we can read in http://www.aosabook.org/en/llvm.html http://www.aosabook.org/en/llvm.html by Chris Lattner: > The name "LLVM" was once an acronym, but is now just a brand for the umbrella project.
- andrewflnr 15y ago
  They probably should have it in their FAQ, though, if they don't.

waitwhat 15y ago

And because you didn't post it either, I had to go to wikipedia as well: Low-Level Virtual Machine.

exDM69 15y ago
The problem with "Low-Level Virtual Machine" is that it gives a very wrong view of what LLVM actually is (because a "virtual machine" is associated with JVM and similar tools). That full name is not even used a whole lot any more, people refer to LLVM as LLVM which means the umbrella project under which a lot of subprojects exist.

bronxbomber92 15y ago

File a bug. http://llvm.org/bugs/ http://llvm.org/bugs/ :)

sixtofour 15y ago
http://llvm.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=11467 http://llvm.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=11467
- exDM69 15y ago
  Oh no you didn't. If you did, you should have at least made the change yourself (IIRC the LLVM website is in their source repositories in SVN or Git) and posted it as a part of your bug report. The LLVM developers are experts in compilers, I'd much more prefer them spending time writing compilers than fixing little things on the web site.

exDM69 15y ago

edit: LLVM once stood for "Low level virtual machine", but that is no longer the meaning. The early name comes from Chris Lattner's research paper describing an "ideal machine language", an intermediate language for compilers which is a little like an Assembly -type language for a virtual machine with infinite registers. The first sentence on the front page of llvm.org pretty much sums it up: "The LLVM Project is a collection of modular and reusable compiler and toolchain technologies." It may not be the clearest LLVM description out there, but that's pretty much what it is. If the description had more detail, it would not fit in one sentence. The hard thing about describing LLVM is that it's a huge complicated project in a domain that's outside even many professional programmers' domain. I tend to say that LLVM is (to me) a "compiler infrastructure", because I use it to build compiler back ends. However, LLVM is so much more than that, as the project includes loosely coupled tools ranging from complete compilers (clang) to debuggers (lldb) to byte code and binary format introspection utilities (llvm's binutils counterparts). So a "compiler infrastructure" or any other dumbed down explanation wouldn't do it justice. That's why the first sentence on the front page is actually pretty good.

sixtofour 15y ago
"if the name is an acronym, you should spell out the acronym" (I did not downvote you BTW) Someone else replied that the project is now just referred to as LLVM. That's fine, but people expect acronyms to stand for something, and the definition or lack of should be way at the top of any project. Lots of people come to a project for the first time and aren't in the know.
- exDM69 15y ago
  Sorry, missed the acronym part. Anyway, spelling out the acronym only creates more confusion. I don't understand the downvotes, if you downvoted, please tell why. I tried to be sensible in explaining what LLVM is and why it's hard to explain. And why it's no longer an acronym.
  - lukesandberg 15y ago
    pedantic: LLVM is not an acronym, it is an initialism. An acronym is when the abbreviated letters spell something pronounceable as a word (GNU, NATO, SCUBA, PATRIOT act...) an initialism is just an abbreviation using the first letter of every word in the abbreviated name or phrase. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acronym_and_initialism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acronym_and_initialism

jstepien 15y ago

As we can read in http://www.aosabook.org/en/llvm.html http://www.aosabook.org/en/llvm.html by Chris Lattner: > The name "LLVM" was once an acronym, but is now just a brand for the umbrella project.

andrewflnr 15y ago
They probably should have it in their FAQ, though, if they don't.