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LLVM 1.4 Released

LLVM 1.4 is now out in the wild. This release adds a large number of new features including JIT support for PowerPC machines, improved debugging information with the C/C++ front-end, better optimizers, new archive support, and a new compiler driver.

Get it now!

-Chris

By Chris Lattner at 2004-12-12 17:56 | LtU Forum | previous forum topic | next forum topic | other blogs | 7067 reads

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Sweet!

This sounds great. Thanks for the new PowerPC coverage!

By Paul Snively at Wed, 2004-12-15 23:28 | login or register to post comments

For marco

...who wrote:

I am kind of hoping that I can stay away from generating assembly for some target machine and the latest gcc hacks seem to make C and C++ a great target language.

LLVM can emit C source as an output option. From LLVM: A Compilation Framework for Lifelong Program Analysis & Transformation:

Compared to source languages, LLVM is a much lower level representation. Even C, which itself is quite low-level, has many features which must be lowered by a compiler targeting LLVM. For example, complex numbers, structure copies, unions, bit-fields, variable sized arrays, and setjmp/longjmp all must be lowered by an LLVM C compiler. In order for the representation to support effective analyses and transformations, the mapping from source language features to LLVM should capture the high-level operational behavior as cleanly as possible.

We discuss this issue by using C++ as an example, since it is the richest language for which we have an implemented front-end. We believe that all the complex, high-level features of C++ are expressed clearly in LLVM, allowing their behavior to be effectively analyzed and optimized.

By Mark Evans at Wed, 2004-12-22 05:38 | login or register to post comments