[OT] Google techtalk on LLVM 2.0 and cfront

[Bill Baxter]

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.

Most of that functionality is actually going into clang, which he pretty 
much said flat out would not support anything besides C,C++ and ObjC. 
But there must be a lot of code that could be leveraged there, and if 
nothing else following the general library-centric design of clang would 
probably be a good thing.  That said it seems like clang is still in the 
very early stages and is no where near being a real C front end yet, let 
alone a C++ front end.

--bb