
LLVM for Grad Students (2015) - onderkalaci
http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~asampson/blog/llvm.html
======
gravypod
I wish there were programs to help open source developers, who are already
working on compilers, to get their work published and get credit for their
effort.

Why should a person who pays a university to give them a project to do get a
degree and recognition and someone who just likes compilers be left with some
thumbs up on a mail list?

~~~
eastWestMath
>Why should a person who pays a university to give them a project to do get a
degree and recognition

I have a few issues with this comment. I am a graduate student and while I
personally work on the theory side, I have labmates involved in these sorts of
projects.

We have to get chosen to work on a project (accepted to grad program, given
funding, taken on as a student by a PL researcher) - these steps are all based
on the merits of our undergraduate work, we are _not_ simply paying to work on
the project. We are directed by an expert in the field, given mentoring, and
work on our projects 30-50 hours a week. It should not be surprising that most
significant recognition-worthy work in programming language theory occurs in
this environment.

~~~
setr
And aren't research masters / phds almost never actually paying for
university, after getting a research position? Paying for the degree is for
undergrads and "professionals"

~~~
eastWestMath
That’s exactly why saying our projects get recognition “just because we’re
paying for a degree” is insulting. Getting into these research groups and
receiving funding is usually pretty competitive, and we spend a lot of time on
these projects while being supervised by experts. It _should not_ be hard to
believe that this leads to better work.

------
ChrisRackauckas
Great stuff! I've gotten pretty familiar with the way LLVM looks since Julia's
`@code_llvm` in front of any function spits out the IR, which is something
that can be useful to learn what's going on and debug performance. I agree
that it's readily human readible. I hope to see a direct interface for adding
passes to Julia in the near future.

------
forg0t_username
This is really cool, I had no idea it was this straightforward to manipulate
LLVM internals. Definitely a side project to explore.

~~~
UncleMeat
This is one of the main reasons why LLVM took over. GCC is a nightmare to work
with by comparison.

------
dang
Discussed at the time:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9998140](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9998140)

------
michaelmior
Probably worth adding (2015) to the title.

~~~
wasx
Why's that?

~~~
michaelmior
I for one appreciate when something that's several years old is clearly
identified as such. That way I know that I should at least consider the
possibility that what I'm reading, if I find it useful, is potentially out of
date.

