The LLVM Compiler Infrastructure

https://cacm.acm.org/federal-funding-of-academic-research/the-llvm-compiler-infrastructure/

by tosh • 19 days ago

80 20 19 days ago

cacm.acm.org

visha1v• 18 days ago

LLVM here refers to the LLVM Compiler Infrastructure, an open source software system created to simplify the design and implementation of compilers and a wide range of compiler-based tools.

MeetingsBrowser• 16 days ago

As opposed to what?

QQ00• 16 days ago

LLM. I guess the commenter didn't want people to confuse LLM with LLVM because of naming similarly.

kelseyfrog• 16 days ago

It's also fairly accessible to LLMs. I was surprised at how quickly a self-hosting compiler could be brought up using the LLVM ecosystem.

arikrahman• 16 days ago

That's what I've been doing with a custom jank implementation, taking advantage of the LLVM changes contributed upstream to LLVM 22.

norir• 16 days ago

This infrastructure is also slow and leads to poor compilation times for any language that uses llvm as a backend. In an era of automatic code generation, this will become more and more of a problem as llvm compilation times will become a huge bottleneck. I am very bearish on llvm as a technology and while I will acknowledge its influence, I expect that it is at or near its peak and market share will decline dramatically over the next five to ten years.

simondotau• 16 days ago

It makes perfect sense to ditch LLVM in development contexts, as its slowness is antithetical to developer productivity — most obviously in tight edit-compile-test loops. And this becomes orders of magnitude more salient when the edit-compile-test loop is being driven by AI.

But even when languages are described as "moving away" that usually means building their own very fast-compiling/min-optimising x64/ARM backend for development builds, while still acknowledging the need for LLVM for highly optimised release builds.

Archit3ch• 14 days ago

For developer productivity, you can move to a REPL workflow with edit-compile-test at the function level. Julia does this while staying on LLVM.

Of course, compile-the-world is still going to be slow, but there is no solution for that in the C++/Rust ecosystems either.

mathisfun123• 16 days ago

In an era of automatic code generation

lol what does this even mean

altmanaltman• 16 days ago

it means that was an AI-generated comment to an article which was also AI-generated. The other comment replying to this comment is also AI-written. The internet is not dead, its just fake

flohofwoe• 16 days ago

Where are the fast alternatives though that do the same level of optimizations?

LLVM might not be the fastest, but when you get to the point that build times become a problem, your code base is too big (or your frontend is doing silly things). Maybe ask your 'automatic code generation' to generate less code bloat ;)

sirwhinesalot• 16 days ago

The only alternative I'm aware of with a similar level of optimization is GCC's backend, which is just as slow.

Both should be much faster at compiling debug builds than they are though. There's an LLVM fork (TPDE-LLVM) that supports a limited set of backend targets but compiles way faster (order of magnitude) for O0, but for whatever reason they haven't managed to merge it with the mainline LLVM. Even with that there's still plenty of overhead from all the horrible C++ OOP-brained abstractions LLVM uses.

high_na_euv• 16 days ago

5 years? There would need to be already production ready, growing alternative

Terretta• 15 days ago

leads to poor compilation times for any language that uses llvm as a backend

it doesn't take long for user delay to sum to more than developer delay

pjmlp• 16 days ago

While LLVM is undoubtedly a great project for compiler research, lets not forget those that predated it with similar ideas like the Amsterdam Compiler Toolkit, or IBM's PL.8 compiler for the RISC project.

tristenharr2• 15 days ago

I’ve been shocked by how much LLVM leaves on the table while designing Logos language! Some very exciting benchmarks coming soon that we’ve been working on for over 6 months, but LLVM misses a LOT of potential optimizations when you have a strong type system!

piinbinary• 15 days ago

Is there a URL for that language? It is unfortunately a bit un-googleable!

santaboom• 15 days ago

found this: https://logicaffeine.com/guide

The LLVM Compiler Infrastructure

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