
LLVM from a Go Perspective - ngaut
https://aykevl.nl/2019/04/llvm-from-go
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vnorilo
Hmm, not sure I agree that LLVM has little documentation. My experience using
it has been pretty smooth.

Regardless, compiling functions from a language you know to LLVM IR is a good
way to learn how IR works. You can do this for C(++) with the clang --emit-
llvm switch. In addition, many optimizers in LLVM are geared towards the IR
patterns clang emits.

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krackers
If you're working at the IR level, then there's usually pretty good
documentation in terms of the doxygen and various pages explaining things.

But if you start venturing down into the backend, a lot of gotchas are never
documented anywhere, just somehow learned through osmosis from another backend
author or looking up code snippets from another implemented backend.

~~~
vnorilo
Sure; the article was about building compilers rather than backends. FWIW I
looked briefly into building a LLVM backend (IR subset) for a DSP chip, and
gave up partly for the reasons you mentioned.

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dis-sys
> compiler libraries such as LLVM make this a whole lot easier, making it
> possible for a single person to develop a new language that is close to C in
> terms of performance.

The TinyGo project is interesting, but it is not a new language developed by a
single person as Go is not a new language.

Wondering is there any such single person project implementing a compiler for
a new language using LLVM and delivering close to C performance?

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darshanime
Meet Wren: [https://github.com/wren-lang/wren](https://github.com/wren-
lang/wren)

~~~
jononor
Any reference for C-like performance?

~~~
rightbyte
With double-NaN pointers I would say no C performance.

