[PATCH] D50858: [M680x0] Add ELF and Triple info

Thu Sep 13 17:32:12 PDT 2018

chandlerc added a comment.

Before we add yet another experimental backend, I think it is somewhat important to know what the long-term user story is and the long-term maintenance story.

I'd love for some folks already active in the community, and especially actively maintaining parts of backends to have looked at the larger new backend effort here and to be supportive of it going in... Even an experimental backend adds significant maintenance burden on the larger community. We're already struggling to support and integrate the current experimental backends we have, and its not clear they are all on a healthy path to becoming non-experimental. I don't think we want eternally experimental backends, I think we should have a really clear path for backends to become 100% supported or be removed. So far, no one from the community has even commented on the llvm-dev thread for this. I think reviewing or landing patches is premature until these higher-order issues are sorted, which probably best happens on llvm-dev as the individual patches may not be a clear place to have that discussion.

Similarly, we have (and to an extent, continue to have) problems with experimental backends never having bots turned up to keep them tested and working. Is there a plan for build bots here?

I don't want to seem super negative about this particular backend -- I don't know anything about it and assume it is generally a good backend. And I have no opinions in any direction about the target. I also don't want to seem negative about the general idea of growing more backends. I think LLVM *should* be actively pursuing new backends where we have the community support for them.

However, I want to make sure that we actually have the necessary community support. Currently, I don't see any evidence of that community support on llvm-dev. I think that needs to be addressed before investing more energy in patches.

Repository:
  rL LLVM

https://reviews.llvm.org/D50858