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I’m definitely happy to see this happening. But I would like to point out two ingredients that constitute LLVM’s success beyond academic merits: License and mod
by mshockwave 2y ago
I’m definitely happy to see this happening. But I would like to point out two ingredients that constitute LLVM’s success beyond academic merits: License and modularity. I’m not a lawyer so can’t say much about the first one, all I can say is that I believe license is one of the main reasons Apple switched to LLVM decades ago. Modularity, on the other hand, is one of the most crucial features of LLVM and something GCC struggles to catch up even nowadays. I really hope Tilde can adopt the modularity philosophy, provide building blocks rather than just tools
- pjmlp 2y agoHad it not been for GPL 3, or the resistance to have GCC being more modular, and Apple, followed by Google, would not have sponsored it. The idea behind LLVM isn't new per se, there have been other similar tools in the past, e.g. Amsterdam Compiler Toolkit.
- astrange 2y agoLLVM is not very modular though. For instance there's no backwards/forwards compatibility in the IR.
- mshockwave 2y agomodular in terms of using only some of the LLVM libraries without the need to pull the entire compiler into your project. In fact, many of the LLVM libraries have absolutely nothing to do with LLVM IR and have zero dependency on it. For instance, LLVMObject and LLVMDebugInfoDWARF. You can use those libraries to build useful tools, like your own objdump or just use it to read debug info.