[llvm-announce] LLVM 2.7 Release!

[Chris Lattner]

Hi LLVM Friends, Fans, Followers and Fanatics,

LLVM 2.7 is live! You can download it here:
http://llvm.org/releases/   and read about it here:
http://llvm.org/releases/2.7/docs/ReleaseNotes.html

This release includes approximately 6 months of development that provide
major enhancements and new features over the LLVM 2.6 release.  This
includes significantly better generated code, improvements to debug
information generation and a broad number of new features in the
core infrastructure.  One exciting feature is that Clang is now able to
bootstrap itself, a major milestone in any compiler's development and
particularly notable considering the complexity of implementing C++!

The new features in LLVM 2.7 are broad and covered in the release notes
but here are some major additions to give a flavor for the improvements:
2.7 includes a new MicroBlaze target, a native code disassembler API
(with X86 supported so far), a much more memory efficient and flexible
representation of debug information, an extensible metadata system that
allows front ends to markup IR with information for language-specific
optimizations (e.g. devirtualization, type based alias analysis, etc)
and other down-stream consumers, direct IR support for taking the
address of a block and jumping to it (which speeds up some interpreters
loops by over 20%!), major progress on the MC project (a new LLVM
native code assembler), and major progress on C++ support in Clang.

Beyond the big features, there are dozens smaller features in LLVM 2.7,
such as support for non-temporal stores, 16-bit half-float support,
much improved X86 tail calls, better inliner heuristics, an improved
implementation of __builtin_object_size, many optimizer improvements,
much nicer comments produced in -fverbose-asm mode, debug info support
in the JIT, substantial footprint reductions for the LLVM compiler
itself (useful for clients of the JIT), full NEON support in the ARM
backend, support for building LLVM as a single big dynamic library,
and more.  Please see the release notes for more details.

Beyond improvements to the code, there are lots of other improvements
in the LLVM world.  We have a new logo: http://llvm.org/Logo.html
(rawr!), a new official LLVM blog: http://blog.llvm.org/ , a much
faster llvm.org server, and the LLVM repository passed 100,000
revisions in March.  Pace of development on LLVM itself and application
of LLVM to other projects continues to increase and expand.

This release would not be possible without our volunteer release team.
Thanks to Tanya Lattner, Pawel Worach, Nick Lewycky, Duncan Sands,
Anton Korobeynikov, and Edwin Torok for their work to qualify and
shepherd the release.  If you have questions or comments about this
release, please contact the LLVMdev mailing list!  Onward to 2.8,

-Chris

LLVM 2.6 Release Announcement:
http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/llvm-announce/2009-October/000033.html