[LLVMdev] RFC: Plugable intrinsics

[Andrew Lenharth]

I can think of many people that use LLVM and maintain out of tree
extentions that will likely never be incorporated into mainline.
Maintaining out of tree intrnisics takes a fair amount of work and leads
to the choice of using a single version of LLVM for a project (and thus
have to manually incorporate bug fixes) or risk untimely breakage.  I
propose that the plugin be extended to allow plugable intrinsics.  To be
sucessful, such a plugin will have to provide hooks for basic AA
information, DAG supoort and legalization, and code generation for some
architectures.

Any of the places that currently handle intrisics would have to be
modified to check loaded libraries for all registered external
intrinsics rather than failing on unknown intrinsics.  This souldn't
slow the processing of builtin intrinsics.

This is the high level idea.  I have more concrete implementation ideas,
but this should suffice for purposes of initial discussion.  I think
this would greatly reduce the burdon of using LLVM in smaller context
like research and make it much easier to try out extentions before
considering them for inclusion in LLVM.

I have talked to several people (both in my group and out) who maintain
out of tree intrinsics and they univerally think this would be a good
idea :)

-- 
Andrew Lenharth <alenhar2 at uiuc.edu>
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