[LLVMdev] Back ends for instructional use?

[Eli Friedman]

On Mon, Aug 15, 2011 at 11:20 AM, Adve, Vikram Sadanand
<vadve at illinois.edu> wrote:
> I'm trying to decide whether to use either the MIPS or ARM back ends for course projects in our introductory compiler class.  I'd like to use something that has a stable back end, so that the students can use the selector, probably without changes, and do a project on register allocation and stack layout.  We don't have MIPS or ARM hardware (other than possibly a few donated Android phones to play with), so a simulator like Spim will be essential.
>
> 1. Is there a similar open-source or free simulator for ARM that would run llc- or lli-generated code on Linux?

Off the top of my head, QEMU will run ARM code; not sure if that's
quite what you need, though.

> 2. How stable is the MIPS back end?  We need the whole thing for testing, and as a reference implementation.

It's not as mature as the ARM backend, but the basics should work.
(Note that there has been some substantial work going into the MIPS
backend on trunk.)

-Eli