[OT] Google techtalk on LLVM 2.0 and cfront

[Bruno Medeiros]

Bill Baxter wrote:
> Knud Soerensen wrote:
>> http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1921156852099786640
> 
> LLVM looks very cool.
> At one point in that talk he says that LLVM isn't trying to replace GCC, 
> that they have different, though partially overlapping goals, and that 
> GCC does some things that LLVM will never do as well as GCC.
> 
> I'm curious what things he was referring to.  It seems to me from his 
> presentation that LLVM(+clang) is very much aiming to replace GCC.  Or 
> at least become the backbone for a next-gen GCC.  Why should he not want 
> to own up to that?  He even goes on to spend a bunch of slides comparing 
> performance of LLVM+clang to GCC.
> 
> But enough of that.
> 
> After watching that presentation I became pretty convinced that the 
> future of D should be LLVM.  They're making exactly the sort of 
> library-based compiler I was talking about not too long ago.  A library 
> that will enable not just compiling but also give access to the AST for 
> things like source code highlighting and source-code translation and 
> code generation tools.
> 

I watched that presentation, and found it very interesting (and very 
smart) that one of the goals of LLVM was to provided an AST useful not 
just for compilation, but also for code analysis tools, including 
*interactive* code analysis tools, like IDEs (which he specificaly 
mentioned several times).
If DMD's AST had such usage in mind as well, it would be saving us IDE 
developers a lot of time and effort.

-- 
Bruno Medeiros - MSc in CS/E student
http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?BrunoMedeiros#D