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

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2022-02-21 19:21:35 +0000, Simon Clubley said:

> 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. :-(

Your hardware shopping list: https://openbenchmarking.org/test/pts/build-llvm

I would hope that developers finding themselves rebuilding most or all 
of llvm will have mid- or upper-range boxes, or are hosting the builds: 
https://blog.nelhage.com/post/building-llvm-in-90s/

VSI wants seriously fast build servers for building OpenVMS itself, too.

> 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 not unusual for any self-hosting compiler, clang or otherwise, 
and particularly for any self-hosting compilers with an evolving 
language specification.

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

Could you point to what you might consider "any reasonable C++ 
compiler"? 🤪  The C++ language is quite powerful, and the resulting 
compilers tend complex. And many developers will want or need different 
C++ subsets.

C compilers tend smaller than C++, and C11 and other subset compilers 
are available: https://github.com/rui314/chibicc

> 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...

In years past, there have been similar discussions around writing a 
custom networking stack, and writing a custom database, and which 
usually also means maintaining and updating the resulting tools and 
toolchains, and which too often grows to the size of whatever was being 
replaced.




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