[Info-vax] LLVM, was: Re: And another one bites the dust....

[Simon Clubley]

On 2022-02-18, Dan Cross <cross at spitfire.i.gajendra.net> wrote:
> In article <suot6g$uus$1 at dont-email.me>,
> Dave Froble  <davef at tsoft-inc.com> wrote:
>>On 2/18/2022 10:12 AM, Dan Cross wrote:
>>> In article <620e5870$0$701$14726298 at news.sunsite.dk>,
>>> Arne Vajhøj  <arne at vajhoej.dk> wrote:
>>>> And since it will be LLVM based then it must be x86-64 only.
>>>
>>> Why do you say that?
>>
>>VAX, Alpha, and itanic are not VSI's future.
>
> Undoubtedly, but I wasn't suggesting that it was.
> My comment was motivated by an apparent statement
> that LLVM == x86.  It does not.
>

There is one way in which LLVM is effectively x86 however and
that is the sheer horsepower and RAM needed to build the damn
thing from source. :-(

I'm also less than impressed in how they keep updating the toolchain
source code with the very latest C++ standards so you need the latest
C++ compilers to build it. (In fairness, that knowledge is from several
versions back, so I don't know if they have matured somewhat recently
and stopped chasing the "nice new shiny" at every opportunity.)

This is exactly the kind of thing that should be easy to build reasonably
quickly with any reasonable C++ compiler. :-(

I wish there were a more lightweight compiler toolchain that targeted
the same range of backends that LLVM does and for which it was also
easy to plug in your own frontend...

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Walking destinations on a map are further away than they appear.