[LLVMdev] CBackend removal

[Owen Anderson]

On Apr 19, 2012, at 9:29 AM, Dmitry N. Mikushin <maemarcus at gmail.com> wrote:

> Dear all,
> 
> I've also noticed C backend was removed a little bit... silently. In
> the end of March I only got open bugs closed by Benjamin Kramer in
> bugzilla, but they sounded like "decision is made". So the question
> is: it such silent removal a normal practice? In times of 3.0 release
> there were long discussions on what to drop and what to preserve, e.g.
> sparc backend, if I remember correctly.
> 
> In our project we are very interested in maintaining usable C backend,
> at least until there will be at least one full and production quality
> PTX backend.

As far back as the LLVM 2.8, the release notes have included this warning:
  "The C backend has numerous problems and is not being actively maintained. Depending on it for anything serious is not advised."

It had, in fact, been non-functional for all but non-trivial functions for much longer than that.  Nobody had ever stepped up to actually fix it, despite various people saying they wanted it to it.  We're not interested in having non-working code hanging around in LLVM, misleading users as to the actual usability of the feature.

If you want to contribute (and maintain!) a *working* C backend, have at it!

--Owen