[llvm-announce] LLVM 2.6 Release!

[Chris Lattner]

Hi LLVM Friends, Fans, Followers and Fanatics,

LLVM 2.6 is live! You can download it here:
http://llvm.org/releases/  and read about it here:
http://llvm.org/releases/2.6/docs/ReleaseNotes.html

This release includes approximately 6 months of development that provide
major enhancements and new features over the LLVM 2.5 release.  This
includes significantly better X86-64 code generation, link-time
optimization support for ELF systems (with 'gold' linker), new code
generators for the MSP430, SystemZ, and BlackFin architectures, support
for multithreaded code generation and optimization, OProfile integration
for the JIT, support for SSE 4.2, ARM V7 support (including Thumb2 and
NEON), Ada2005 bindings, many improved optimizations, bug fixes, and
extensions and enhancements to the runtime API.  Please see the release
notes for more details.

A major highlight of the LLVM 2.6 release is the first public release of
the Clang compiler (http://clang.llvm.org), which is now considered to
be production quality for C and Objective-C code on X86 targets.  Clang
produces much better error and warning messages than GCC
(http://clang.llvm.org/diagnostics.html) and can compile Objective-C
code 3x faster than GCC 4.2 (http://clang.llvm.org/performance.html),
among other major features.

In addition to Clang, the LLVM project has grown a number of new LLVM
sub-projects, including:
- compiler-rt: Compiler runtime library (http://compiler-rt.llvm.org/)
- KLEE: Symbolic Analysis & Test Case Generator (http://klee.llvm.org/)
- DragonEgg: "llvm-gcc" plugin for GCC 4.5 (http://dragonegg.llvm.org/)

This release also includes the early start of a new "llvm-mc" project
(http://llvm.org/releases/2.6/docs/ReleaseNotes.html#mc), which aims to
auto-generate a suite of assembler, disassembler, and other machine code
technology from the LLVM target descriptions.

One of the things I'm really excited to see is the number of external
projects that are applying LLVM technology in interesting new ways.  The
release notes lists two Ruby implementations (Rubinius and MacRuby), the
Pure language, the LLVM D Compiler, the Roadsend PHP compiler, Unladen
Swallow (Python) and LLVM-Lua.  These projects show an amazing breadth
of different languages adopting LLVM as their shared optimization,
code generation, and JIT technologies (depending on the project).

Besides open source projects, there are a number of commercial
organizations applying LLVM in innovative new ways
(http://llvm.org/Users.html), and LLVM is being used for a wide range
of research projects published at the top academic conferences and
journals (http://llvm.org/pubs/).  It is truly exciting to see what
people are doing with LLVM!

Finally, we just wrapped up the third annual LLVM Developer's Meeting,
which was a great opportunity for LLVM people to meet face-to-face and
exchange ideas.  The event web site (http://llvm.org/devmtg/2009-10/)
includes slides and videos for most of the talks.  We send many thanks
out to Apple, Google, Adobe and Qualcomm Incorporated for sponsoring
the event!

This release would not be possible without our volunteer release team.
Thanks to Tanya Lattner, Pawel Worach, and Nick Lewycky for their work
to qualify and shepherd the release.  If you have questions or comments
about this release, please contact the LLVMdev mailing list!

-Chris

LLVM 2.5 Release Announcement:

http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/llvm-announce/2009-March/000031.html