Apple Investing in LLVM for GCC 4?
Posted on November 19, 2005
Filed Under /dev/null/ | 103 views |
From this posting over on the GCC list by Chris Lattner it would appear that Apple is looking to push forward with the LLVM compiler optimizer, integrated against GCC 4.
Given that the current release of GCC with OS X is only 4.0.1 while the actual official current release is 4.1.0 could this be seen in a tandem release when Apple updates GCC to 4.1? That would be cool.
Note this particularly interesting statement in Chris’ email:
The LLVM code generator is built on modern techniques. For example, it uses pattern-matching DAG-based instruction selection, maintains SSA form up until register allocation, represents code in a form quite similar to the “compressed RTL” proposal [7], and supports dynamically loaded targets. We currently have stable code generators for PowerPC and X86, with targets for Alpha, IA-64, and Sparc also available, but less stable. LLVM can also emit C code, which allows it to support systems for which we do not have a native code generator implemented.
Sounds like interesting might be afoot at Apple in the world of compilation. (For those who don’t know, XCode uses GCC as its compiler.)
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