[OT] Google techtalk on LLVM 2.0 and cfront

[Tristam MacDonald]

Also worth looking at re D is the HLVM (http://hlvm.org/), a little know 
front-end toolkit for LLVM. it is intended to make the work of building 
the compiler front-end as painless as LLVM does for the back-end. Sadly, 
it isn't very active at the moment, but perhaps with a little TLC...

Bruno Medeiros wrote:
> 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.
>