" This is his way to bring gcc into the modern era"
and
"He's seriously invested in cleaning up gcc and making it a competitive compiler."
Optimization wise, GCC is still much more modern than LLVM, and in fact, more modern than a most commercial compilers.
Architecture wise, there are warts, but bringing GCC into the modern era architecturally was never a technical/engineering challenge.
To be honest, speaking as a guy who wrote plenty of GCC's current optimizations, he'd be a lot better off fixing LLVM's JIT issues than trying to rearchitect GCC.
At this point, it's hard to come up with good reasons to continue work on GCC past "fun".
I work on a runtime compiler with LLVM and gcc backends. LLVM presents me with a nice API to generate its IR in memory. For gcc, I actually write out a ".c" file and then invoke gcc to compile it into a shared library, which I load with dlopen. It works, but it's messy and I would prefer to work with an API like LLVM's. This project is exactly what I've been looking for.
Comments
Could you explain what you mean by
" This is his way to bring gcc into the modern era" and "He's seriously invested in cleaning up gcc and making it a competitive compiler."
Optimization wise, GCC is still much more modern than LLVM, and in fact, more modern than a most commercial compilers.
Architecture wise, there are warts, but bringing GCC into the modern era architecturally was never a technical/engineering challenge.
To be honest, speaking as a guy who wrote plenty of GCC's current optimizations, he'd be a lot better off fixing LLVM's JIT issues than trying to rearchitect GCC.
At this point, it's hard to come up with good reasons to continue work on GCC past "fun".
I work on a runtime compiler with LLVM and gcc backends. LLVM presents me with a nice API to generate its IR in memory. For gcc, I actually write out a ".c" file and then invoke gcc to compile it into a shared library, which I load with dlopen. It works, but it's messy and I would prefer to work with an API like LLVM's. This project is exactly what I've been looking for.