[cfe-dev] alternate clang driver

[Chris Lattner]

On Oct 21, 2011, at 2:47 PM, David Chisnall wrote:
> On 21 Oct 2011, at 22:15, reed kotler wrote:
> 
>> I don't buy the C++ is faster that Python argument. It's just a driver 
>> for a compiler! You could write it in Turing machine primitives and it 
>> would be super fast on a modern computer. It's not computing the 
>> strongly connected components of a terabyte sized graph.
> 
> The issue is start-up time.  It takes longer to launch the python process than it does for the entire compilation and code generation process to happen on small C files at -O0.  

I completely agree.  The startup time for python was a huge problem for the *first* clang driver, which happened to be written about Python.

FWIW, Reed contacted me about this work back in May.  I encouraged him to contribute to improving the main Clang driver, and he wasn't interested.  It's perfectly fine for him to go off and do something different, but this work clearly isn't interesting to mainline clang development.  I don't see why we're still discussing it :)

-Chris