LLVM Weekly - #104, Dec 28th 2015
Welcome to the one hundred and fourth 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
The schedule for the LLVM devroom at FOSDEM has been published. This will be on January 30th 2016 in Brussels at FOSDEM.
Andy Finnell spent some time over the Christmas vacation porting the LLVM Kaleidoscope tutorial to Erlang and has kindly shared the fruits of his labours.
Richard Pennington has written another blog post about ELLCC, this time about using it to cross-compile the Linux kernel for the Raspberry Pi.
Tim Jones (lecturer at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory) has written about the alias analysis used in the HELIX compiler. There's nothing LLVM-specific here, indeed it was implemented using ILDJIT but should be of general interest to compiler developers.
On the mailing lists
Keno Fischer has posted a proposal for multi-location debug info support in LLVM IR. This would allow, for instance, modelling when a variable is available either on the stack or in a register.
Adam Nemet is proposing to extend the PowerPC software prefetching pass to work on other targets, specifically AArch64.
Russel Wallace asks for advice on finding all pointers to functions, and had a number of suggestions in response.
For a while now, Galina Kistanova has been posting statistics from the LLVM buildbots. This includes the number of commits for each project, the number of failed builds, and average build time. I haven't linked to it before, so felt I should rectify that.
LLVM commits
An initial implementation of an LLVMCodeView library has landed. This implements support for emitting debug info in the CodeView format. r256385.
lit has gained support for a per-test timeout which can be set using
--timeout=. r256471.All uses of edge wights in BranchProbabilityInfo have been replaced with probabilities. r256263.
The LLVM project documentation on patch reviews via Phabricator now has advice on choosing reviewers. r256265.
The gc.statepoint intrinsic's return type is now a token type rather than i32. r256443.
Clang commits
ASTtemplateKWAndArgsInfo and ASTTemplateArgumentListInfo have been converted to use the TrailingObjects header. This abstracts away
reinterpret_cast, pointer arithmetic, and size calculations needed for the case where a class has some other objects appended to the end of it. r256359.