What are the greatest benefits of LLVM?

c++ c llvm clang
Kevin picture Kevin · Oct 6, 2008 · Viewed 9.4k times · Source

Does anyone have experience with LLVM, llvm-gcc, or Clang?

The whole idea behind llvm seems very intriguing to me and I'm interested in seeing how it performs. I just don't want to dump a whole lot of time into trying the tools out if the tools are not ready for production.

If you have experience with the tools, what do you think of them? What major limitations have you encountered? What are the greatest benefits?

Many thanks!

Answer

Louis Gerbarg picture Louis Gerbarg · Nov 1, 2008

I can't say enough good things about LLVM. It is so easy to work with compared to other compiler projects I have looked at. I am not a compiler guy, but when I get frustrated with some limitation of LLVM or clang it is usually pretty easy to dive in and change it.

We (Nate Begeman, myself, and a few others) wrote the PPC backend with no real experience in compiler design, but it looked simple enough that non-experts could approach it. We were pretty familiar with PPC assembly, but it was still pretty incredible we managed to get LLVM-gcc outputting PPC code in a few weeks of our spare time. Definitely one of the most satisfying Hello World's I have ever compiled.

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