[LLVMdev] Couple newbie questions :|

[Tres Walsh]

Thanks for the response :D
I have used Python and Lua before. I'd love to use the syntax of lua with
the object oriented ness of python, and I thought LLVM would be a way to do
that.
Again your help is appreciated.
On Sun, Aug 2, 2009 at 12:25 AM, Eli Friedman <eli.friedman at gmail.com>wrote:

> On Sat, Aug 1, 2009 at 11:43 PM, Tres Walsh<tres.walsh at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hello there!
> > I'm an absolute newb at LLVM,and I was hoping someone could answer a few
> of
> > my questions.
> > I'm currently working on a game engine. As part of it's design, I need a
> > virtual machine for scripts. Is LLVM suited for this at all? Such as
> > registering external functions that can be called from the scripts?
>
> Possibly... but you're sort of making the decision at the wrong level;
> LLVM is really a low-level solution intended for implementing a
> language.  If you need scripts, you probably want a scripting language
> of some sort, and if you're working on a game engine, you probably
> don't want to write your own scripting language, since it's a lot of
> work with no obvious benefit.  There are numerous existing open-source
> solutions for this; I think Python and Lua are popular choices for
> that sort of thing.
>
> > And if
> > this did work, it wouldn't really matter what language the original
> scripts
> > were written in, since they all get compiled down to the LLVM bytecode
> > correct?
>
> You can't really just compile a scripting language down to LLVM
> bitcode and expect good performance; you really need some glue code to
> mix interpretation, compilation, and possibly recompilation at runtime
> to get good performance.  And if the scripts in question aren't
> performance-sensitive, there's not really much point to using LLVM.
> It strongly depends on what you're doing.
>
> > As of now what platforms does LLVM not compile on? Is it good for
> embedded
> > work?
>
> In terms of platforms, it'll probably work for everything you might
> care about; see http://llvm.org/docs/ReleaseNotes-2.6.html#portability
> (although note that only some of those platforms have working JIT
> support).  As for embedded work, it depends on what you mean by
> embedded; if 10MB code footprint sounds way too large, LLVM is
> probably not the way to go.
>
> You might want to take a look at http://llvm.org/docs/tutorial/ to get
> a better idea of what LLVM can do.
>
> -Eli
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-- 
http://treswalsh.com
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