[LLVMdev] Google Summer of Code 2008

[Evan Cheng]

On Mar 18, 2008, at 2:49 PM, Jon Harrop wrote:

> On Tuesday 18 March 2008 20:17:52 Anton Korobeynikov wrote:
>> Hello, Everyone
>>
>> LLVM recently was approved to take part in Google Summer of Code  
>> 2008.
>> We welcome everyone to apply for this program.
>>
>> The list of ideas for (possible) projects is located at
>> http://llvm.org/OpenProjects.html. Surely you can suggest any other
>> project, if you feel, that it definitely can be useful.
>
> Just some ideas to add to the mix:
>
> One of the suggestions is to write a code-density optimizer for the  
> ARM
> backend. For an interesting alternative, try optimizing for power  
> consumption
> instead. If you want something super researchy, try doing this for  
> one of the
> clockless (asynchronous) ARM cores:
>
>  http://www.arm.com/products/CPUs/ARM996HS.html

While we are talking about ARM. Raul H. worked on ARM JIT support last  
summer, it would be nice if someone continues the work.

Evan

>
>
> Another suggestion under "Miscellaneous Additions" was to write a new
> front-end for Java/OCaml/Forth. IMHO, reimplementing Java or OCaml  
> from
> scratch is way too much work and a lot of that work is uninteresting  
> baggage.
> My personal dream is to implement a higher-level VM that bundles an  
> existing
> concurrent GC with an intermediate representation that exposes high- 
> level
> language-agnostic features like parametric polymorphism (generics),
> first-class lexical closures (and maybe even pattern matching) and a  
> backend
> that type specializes to remove polymorphism (and the associated run- 
> time
> performance hit, as seen in OCaml) before LLVM code is generated. I  
> would
> like this for two reasons:
>
> a) to provide the foundation for better technical computing  
> environments on
> Linux and Mac OS X (like F# for Windows). This could greatly improve  
> the open
> source tools that scientists and engineers use for technical  
> computing.
>
> b) to provide a CLR. This could make it much easier for industry to  
> build and
> sell software written in exotic languages for Linux and Mac OS X.
>
> A tamer but related idea is to implement a Fortran 77 front-end for  
> LLVM and
> then get LAPACK into the LLVM benchmark suite. This could help LLVM to
> improve and might provide a faster LAPACK library for the open  
> source world.
>
> FFTW is another hugely important numerical library that could be  
> used for
> benchmarking. Aside from simply getting FFTW to work using llvm-gcc,  
> an
> interesting project might be to rewrite the OCaml source code in  
> FFTW to
> generate codelets on-the-fly using LLVM or the CLang front-end. LLVM  
> can
> probably beat GCC here, not least because an LLVM-based  
> implementation would
> not be limited to a set of precompiled codelets. This could help the  
> millions
> of people who use FFTW.
>
> On an unrelated note, LLVM has great potential for improving OCaml's  
> FFI. At
> the moment, OCaml programmers are expected to write stubs in C and  
> statically
> link them in with their OCaml code. A much better solution would be  
> to use
> LLVM to generate the equivalent of the C stubs at run-time. Calling  
> OpenGL
> directly from OCaml using LLVM without any existing OpenGL bindings  
> would
> make an excellent example. This project could really help the OCaml
> community.
>
> -- 
> Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd.
> http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/?e
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