<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
</head>
<body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000">
<font face="Calibri">Hi,<br>
<br>
This may be a daft question, but I have just begun taking a
serious look at LLVM for a project that I am working on. Knowing
myself pretty well, the probability that I ever complete the
project is infinitesimal. I am saying this so you don't jump up
out of your chair, yelling "HOORAY!" because I am considering to
use LLVM. Think of me as an academic student with too much time
on his hands, who is considering if he dares embark on the
adventure of getting to know LLVM. The way I see it, my life is
going to be much easier if I can delegate the responsibility for
generating good code for a number of targets to you guys and
instead focus on what I am trying to do. Also, I particularly
like the aspect of global optimizations (link-time optimizations)
in LLVM - they're one of the selling features of my project.<br>
<br>
The project is a new programming language
(<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.braceless.org">http://www.braceless.org</a>) for which I have been contemplating
writing my own backends, but the more I think of it, the less I
like the idea. I know you guys from earlier where I posted a
suggestion for an alternate implementation of exceptions (one that
uses only a single bit to indicate whether an exception has
occured and then uses the ordinary return value registers for the
pointer to the exception instance, in the rare event that an
exception really happens) and it seems to me that there's a
natural match between what you do and what I'd like to do.<br>
<br>
Now I at least have two problems: 1) I've written my "compiler"
(language parser, really) in C# and 2) I don't seem to be able to
find any procedures on building LLVM on Windows. The first
problem is easy to solve; I'll gladly recode my project in C++
just to get to use LLVM. The other problem is a bit bigger,
though: LLVM's Windows support.<br>
<br>
Do you plan to offer "true" Windows support - i.e. release
binaries/libraries for Windows and offer a build system that can
be used on Windows? Or is LLVM always going to be a mostly
*nix-only project?<br>
<br>
IF LLVM already supports building on Windows, please don't flame
me but simply tell me in nice words that I am a moron and how to
build LLVM for Windows. I am mostly interested in native x86_64
support for Windows.<br>
<br>
If there's anything I can do to help, please don't hesitate to let
me know. I am on and off coding on portable build system written
in C# for .NET/Mono (portable to a wide variety of hosts), which I
could perhaps some day finish up and use to build the Windows
release of LLVM. Perhaps I can be of some value as a real-life
tester of the Win64 backend? My initial goal is to target Windows
x64 first and then later on Windows x86, PPC, and so on.<br>
<br>
P.S. I have a Windows 7 x64 box and a Debian 6.0 Linux 64-bit PPC
box (an ancient iMac G5 converted to a Linux box). I do know
Linux and CAN work under Linux, but I prefer to use Windows
because of the popularity of this platform and the fact that I
have spent the last 20+ years working primarily on the PC/Windows
platform.<br>
<br>
P.P.S. I love writing documentation so I wouldn't mind putting
together some docs on how to get flying with LLVM on Windows.<br>
<br>
<br>
Sincerely,<br>
Mikael Lyngvig<br>
<br>
</font>
</body>
</html>