Re: LLVM as a gcc plugin?

["Grigori Fursin" <grigori dot fursin at inria dot fr>]

Hi guys,

Just saw this discussion so wanted to mention that we at HiPEAC are now interested
to use both GCC as static compiler and LLVM as run-time infrastructure for research
and several colleagues wanted to port ICI framework (the recent release is based
on the "official" gcc plugin branch) to LLVM. We want to have both official
gcc plugins and ICI addition on top of it since we have a relatively large community
already around those tools and ICI plugins, and additional tools for automatic program 
optimization.

I will unlikely be involved in that now because I just don't have time so I CCed
this email to Andy Nisbet who has been interested to provide plugin system for LLVM,
Zbigniew Chamski who supports ICI for GCC and also Albert Cohen and Ayal Zaks 
who are also coordinating those activities within HiPEAC. 

The idea is to make GCC and LLVM more attractive to the researchers (i.e. that it's
easy to use compilers without knowing internals much) so that research ideas could
go back to the compilers much faster improving GCC and LLVM ...

Cheers,
Grigori


> On Jun 3, 2009, at 11:30 PM, Uros Bizjak wrote:
>
>    Hello!
>
>    Some time ago, there was a discussion about integrating LLVM and GCC
>    [1]. However, with plugin infrastructure in place, could LLVM be
>    plugged into GCC as an additional optimization plugin?
>
>
>    [1] http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2005-11/msg00888.html 
>
>
> Hi Uros,
>
> I'd love to see this, but I can't contribute to it directly. I think the plugin interfaces would
need small 
> extensions, but there are no specific technical issues preventing it from happening. LLVM has
certainly progressed a 
> lot since that (really old) email went out :)
>
> -Chris