[LLVMdev] llvm useability?

[Chris Lattner]

On Jan 21, 2008, at 4:09 AM, Neal Becker wrote:

> Has llvm reached the point that it is useable as a mainstream c++  
> compiler?

Yes.  LLVM 2.2 will be out in a few weeks, it will be the best release  
yet.  Many people use llvm to build large C++ code bases.

> Are there benchmarks available comparing generated code to gcc4?  My
> primary interest is scientific-type computing.

There are lots of benchmarks (see the nightly tester for example), but  
it always makes sense to pick your own benchmark and do an evaluation  
yourself.  If you know of any important and self-contained benchmarks  
that can be added to our performance testsuite, please let us know.

The most important thing to know for numeric performance is that LLVM  
currently generates very poor code when targeting machines that do not  
have SSE2 or later.  When building llvm-gcc, make sure to configure it  
for a CPU that has SSE2 or later to get good performance.

-Chris