[LLVMdev] SoC proposal: HLVM Python front-end

Rooslan S. Khayrov khayrov at gmail.com
Wed Mar 21 15:03:27 PDT 2007


Hi,

I am senior student at Tashkent University of Information Technologies
and I am highly interested in programming language design. I want to
develop Python front-end for HLVM as a part of LLVM participation in
Google Summer of Code project.

I am in long love with Python programming language for its simplicity
and effectiveness. Last year I noticed ShedSkin Python to C++
translator among SoC projects and idea of Python high-performance
compiler fascinated me. Later I learned about LLVM compiler
infrastructure project. It was looking as a great target for such
compiler offering much more flexibility than C without pain of dealing
with assembly/machine code generation. (Well, folks from PyPy were
thinking in the same direction much earlier.) And finally I found the
related HLVM project aiming to help in exactly what I want to do. Not
as robust as LLVM at that time but very promising.

(I hope it's all ok to suggest an HLVM-related project as I have
already seen an interest in such project here in this mail-list.)

HLVM roadmap sets Python support after Ruby and Scheme ones, but I
think this is not essential. Python "pros":
— I know it better.
— It's in wider use today, particularly in desktop applications where
HLVM back-end features (high performance, lesser code size) will be
more useful.
— It's tightly related with my BS thesis, so I'll start working
whether or not application will be accepted, but having Google to pay
for it will be really nice :-)

Chris Lattner in his recent presentation set an ambitious goal of
developing common representation and type inference infrastructure for
dynamic languages. I want to see HLVM evolving into such framework and
will be very glad to make my own contribution on this.

Sorry for coming up with this a bit late but it's better than never.


-- 
Best regards,
Rooslan




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