Live data from Hacker News

Tilde, My LLVM Alternative

yasserarg.com

21–30 of 165 posts

Re: Tilde, My LLVM Alternative

#21
post #17
post #2

Cool. The author has set himself a huge task if he wants to build something like LLVM. An alternative would be to participate in a project with similar goals that is already quite progressed, such as QBE or Eigen ( https://github.com/EigenCompilerSuite/ ) ; both so far lack of optimizers. I consider Eigen very attractive because it supports much more targets and includes assemblers and linkers for all targets. I see…

What’s unfortunate about C++17? It has some nice features that build on C++11’s safety and ergonomic improvements.

You need a large, modern C++ compiler and standard library, which are not available for most older systems, and you're inviting an excess of dependencies because not all compilers support all parts of the newer C++ standards (in the same way), and require a lot more resources and newer versions of APIs and libraries, which further limits their usability on older systems. Furthermore, C89 and C++98 are much easier to bootstrap than a colossus like LLVM and Clang. The few "nice features" are perhaps enticing, but the costs they incur are disproportionate.

Re: Tilde, My LLVM Alternative

#24
post #8

>I'm calling it Tilde (or TB for tilde backend) and the reasons are pretty simple, i believe it's far too slow at compiling and far too big to be fixed from the inside. It's been 20 years and cruft has built up, time for a "redo". That put a smile on my face because I remember that was how LLVM was born out of frustration with GCC. I dont know how the modern GCC and LLVM compares, I remember LLVM was fast but resulti…

Intel still has a decent use for compiling math heavy code for intel processors — so it gets a decent amount of use in HPC applications. It has some of the best vectorization passes but they only work with actual intel cpus. So it’s starting to get less traction as AMD takes the performance crown and as vectorized math moves to the gpu.

Re: Tilde, My LLVM Alternative

#25

Looking at the commit history inspires some real confidence! https://github.com/RealNeGate/Cuik/commits/master/

went to write exactly that. Ambitions are great and I dont want to be dissuasive, but monumental tasks require monumental effort and monumental effort requires monumental care. That implies good discipline and certain "beauty" standards that also apply to commit messages. Bad sign :)

Re: Tilde, My LLVM Alternative

#26

Looking at the commit history inspires some real confidence! https://github.com/RealNeGate/Cuik/commits/master/

chicken (+558998, -997)

Cursed. I had a coworker once would commit diffs like that but always with the message "Cleanup". The git history was littered with "Cleanup" commits that actually hid all kinds of stuff in them. If you pulled them up on it (or anything else) they went into defensive meltdown mode, so everyone on the team just accepted it and moved on.

Re: Tilde, My LLVM Alternative

#27
post #8

>I'm calling it Tilde (or TB for tilde backend) and the reasons are pretty simple, i believe it's far too slow at compiling and far too big to be fixed from the inside. It's been 20 years and cruft has built up, time for a "redo". That put a smile on my face because I remember that was how LLVM was born out of frustration with GCC. I dont know how the modern GCC and LLVM compares, I remember LLVM was fast but resulti…

Back 20 or more years ago I used to do a lot of rec math competition programming and found that the metrowerks c++ compiler made massively faster programs than gcc, vsstudio, intel and everything else I tried then.

This seemed to be simply down to variable alignment; the programs took more memory but ran much faster, particularly multi-core (which was still high end then).

And this was on x86 where metrowerks weren't really competing, and was probably accidental. But the programs it compiled were fast.

I'd be surprised if anyone even knew that metrowerks had a c++ compiler on x86 on windows. At the time metrowerks were on the tail end of their domination of mac compilers from before mac ran on x86.

Re: Tilde, My LLVM Alternative

#29

> I believe it's (LLVM) far too slow at compiling and far too big to be fixed from the inside What are you doing to make sure Tilde does not end up like this?

"You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain".

You either reinvent the wheel but square or live long enough to make it a circle.

Re: Tilde, My LLVM Alternative

#30

Looking at the commit history inspires some real confidence! https://github.com/RealNeGate/Cuik/commits/master/

went to write exactly that. Ambitions are great and I dont want to be dissuasive, but monumental tasks require monumental effort and monumental effort requires monumental care. That implies good discipline and certain "beauty" standards that also apply to commit messages. Bad sign :)

Not really. In the initial phase of a project there is usually so much churn than enforcing proper commit messages is not worth it, until the dust settle down.
Post reply on HN