LLVM Weekly - #62, Mar 9th 2015
Welcome to the sixty-second issue of LLVM Weekly, a weekly newsletter (published every Monday) covering developments in LLVM, Clang, and related projects. LLVM Weekly is brought to you by Alex Bradbury. Subscribe to future issues at http://llvmweekly.org and pass it on to anyone else you think may be interested. Please send any tips or feedback to asb@asbradbury.org, or @llvmweekly or @asbradbury on Twitter.
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News and articles from around the web
LLVM is taking part in Google Summer of Code as a mentoring organisation. Students can earn a $5500 stipend by working on open source projects over the summer. See here for the list of mentoring organisations advertising LLVM-related projects. Please do help spread the word, applications open on Monday the 16th of March. I am biased, but I'd like to draw particular attention to the wide variety of lowRISC GSoC ideas, including a project to use tagged memory to provide protection against control-flow hijacking.
Ravi, a programming language based on Lua 5.3 has been announced. It features JIT compilation using LLVM, though in the current development version only a fraction of the Lua bytecodes are JIT-compiled.
On the mailing lists
Douglas Gregor has posted an RFC on adding nullability qualifiers. The mailing list post justifies the reason for adding new qualifiers despite the fact
__attribute__((nonnull))exists.Jonas Paulsson queries the current status of spilling support in the PBQP register allocator. As Arnaud confirms, there's still work to be done to improve things.
Chris Bieneman has posted an update on the CMake build system's ability to replace autoconf.
Tom Stellard has shared his proposed release schedule for 3.5.2 and 3.6.1. This would see 3.5.2 released on the 25th of March and 3.6.1 on the 13th of May.
LLVM commits
An initial implementation of a loop interchange pass has landed. This will interchange loops to provide a more cache-friendly memory access. r231458.
A high-level support library for the new pass manager has been added. r231556.
The LLVM performance tips document has seen some new additions. r230995, r231352.
DenseMapIterators will now fail fast when compiled in debug mode. r231035.
LowerBitSets will now use byte arrays rather than bit sets to represent in-memory bit sets, which can be looked up with only a few instructions. r231043.
Another large portion of the DebugInfo changes has landed. r231082.
A new optimisation for AddressSanitizer has been added that reduces the amount of instrumentation needed, eliminating it when accessing stack variables that can be proven to be inbounds. r231241.
llvm.frameallocate has been replaced with llvm.frameescape. r231386.
Clang commits
When the
-pedanticflag is given, clang will warn when a format string uses%pwith non-void*args. r231211.Work on MS ABI support continues. Throwing a C++ exception under the MS ABI is now supported. r231328.