LLVM Weekly - #63, Mar 16th 2015
Welcome to the sixty-third 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, and applications upon today (March 16th). See here for the list of mentoring organisations advertising LLVM-related projects. Please do help spread the word. I am biased, but I'd like to draw particular attention to the wide variety of lowRISC GSoC ideas, including a project to implement an LLVM pass using tagged memory to provide protection against control-flow hijacking.
Version 0.11 of Pocl, the portable open-source OpenCL implementation has been released. Additions in this release include initial Android support and MIPS architecture support.
Version 1.11 of TCE, the TTA-based (Transport Triggered Architecture) Co-design Environment, which uses LLVM has been released. This release adds support for LLVM 3.6.
There will be a LLVM microconference at the Linux Plumbers Conference in August. There is a call for speakers.
On the mailing lists
If you enjoy bikesheds, this thread may be for you. Renato Golin has kicked off a thread on commit message policy.
Rui Ueyama has posted to the mailing list summarising his recent work on LLD performance improvements. The follow up responses discuss potential remaining bottlenecks.
William Moses is interested in parallel extensions to LLVM IR, and the thread spawned quite a few interesting responses.
Mohammad Kazem's question about counting loads and stores of variables elicited some useful responses.
Will Dietz who has been maintaining the unofficial LLVM Github mirror for the past few years is interested in LLVM taking over the service 'officially'.
LLVM commits
As DataLayout is now mandatory, LLVM APIs have been updated to use references to DataLayout. r231740.
Support was added for part-word atomics on PowerPC. r231843.
Initial work on enhancing ValueTracking to infer known bits of a value from known-true conditional expressions has landed. r231879.
The PowerPC READMEs have been updated to list potential future enhancements. r231946.
The
llvm.eh.actionsintrinsic has been added. r232003.The documentation for llvm-cov has been updated. r232007.
The getting started docs now describe CMake as the preferred way to build LLVM. r232135.
llvm-vtabledump is now known as llvm-cxxdump. r232301.
Clang commits
The steady stream of OpenMP patches continues, with the addition of codegen support for the omp task directive and omp for. r231762, r232036.
Copy-constructor closures for MS ABI support has been added. r231952.