Re: LLVM or GCC or Intel?
Re: LLVM or GCC or Intel?
- Subject: Re: LLVM or GCC or Intel?
- From: "Shawn Erickson" <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2008 08:46:45 -0700
On Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 4:05 AM, J. Todd Slack
<email@hidden> wrote:
> But what about LLVM? I have not heard of this much in the past (just off and
> on) and now that it seems Apple is moving away from GCC in favor of LLVM,
> what should developers do?
Apple is investing in LLVM and Clang. Additionally Apple is using LLVM
in a few pathways on Mac OS X already (as a JIT complier in OpenGL for
example). Also Apple has included LLVM and llvm-gcc in the latest
Xcode Tools as an experimental option.
> Are there advantages of LLVM over GCC?
The main one from the perspective of Xcode is that fact that LLVM and
Clang are built as libraries so they can be compiled directly into
Xcode allowing it to fire off compiles, etc. without having to fork
processes / call external tools. Additionally the robust AST generate
by Clang should allow much more powerful code re-factoring and code
sense capabilities in Xcode.
The LLVM IR has some interesting properties for code rewriting,
hacking, deferred code generation, etc.
<http://llvm.org/Features.html>
<http://clang.llvm.org/comparison.html#gcc>
<http://clang.llvm.org/features.html#performance>
> Any advantages of LLVM when needing to compile for OS X, Windows, Linux,
> Solaris, etc? (as I sometimes do)
Likely but LLVM is still relatively young with Clang younger still.
LLVM is very much usable and has support for various platforms on
interest to the contributer of the project.
> Is Apple investing in LLVM a sign that maybe there will be more PC apps from
> Apple? Does Apple use Visual Studio for iTunes and Safari? Or does anyone
> think they might have a hidden XCode for Windows that might debut someday?
> (This would be great in my opinion!!)
GCC already exists on the Windows side of playground. The existence of
and Apple's investment in LLVM and Clang have little to do with Xcode,
etc. existing on Windows.
-Shawn
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