Fwd: Re: [LLVMdev] new IA64 backend

[Ricardo]

Does anybody know if there is some tool to convert from WHIRL to LLVM? maybe some project under
development? a similar project?

Thanks




> 
> --- Duraid Madina <duraid at octopus.com.au> wrote:
> > Date: Fri, 18 Mar 2005 12:45:54 +0900
> > From: Duraid Madina <duraid at octopus.com.au>
> > To: ahs3 at fc.hp.com, LLVM Developers Mailing List <llvmdev at cs.uiuc.edu>
> > Subject: Re: [LLVMdev] new IA64 backend
> > CC: 
> > 
> > Al Stone wrote:
> > > On Fri, 2005-03-18 at 05:04 +0900, Duraid Madina wrote:
> > >
> > > Woo hoo!  And There Was Much Rejoicing in IA64 Land :-).
> > 
> > So we see here that Al has not yet run the test suite. ;-)
> > 
> > Hmm. For those _not_ in IA64 land, here a few random things that might 
> > be interesting:
> > 
> > 	- IA64, perhaps more than any other general purpose computing 
> > architecture, depends on something like LLVM for high performance. 
> > Whole-program optimization simply 'falls out' with LLVM, yet this is 
> > more or less the limit of what the Intel and HP compiles can do. 
> > Life-long optimization is particularly important on IA64, because 
> > there's only so much that the hardware can do to "help itself." It's 
> > true that some aspects of IA64 are completely orthogonal to things like 
> > out-of-order execution and one can imagine a monster "Itanium 4" (4 as 
> > in "Pentium 4" ;) ), but I personally hope that Intel doesn't go down 
> > that path - at least not until LLVM/IA64 has had a chance to conquer the 
> > world^W^W^Wprove itself in the field. Anyone who saw Intel's 
> > presentation at this year's ISSCC will probably hope so too; an Itanium 
> > 2/12MB @2.5GHz dissipating ~50W can be a frightfully powerful and fairly 
> > _efficient_ device for the 90nm node, but it only shines if you have the 
> > compiler support there.
> > 
> > 	- IA64 specifies performance gathering abilities that are (to my 
> > knowledge, anyway) simply unparalleled. This might be interesting/useful 
> > for the LLVM-reoptimization folk.
> > 
> > 	- JITs can be particularly quick on IA64. (No, really!) Register 
> > allocation is a piece of cake for example, and the IA64 machine model is 
> > quite simple.
> > 
> > 	- The IA64 backend is a little odd in that it defines a register class 
> > for booleans, not just i64s and f64s.
> > 
> > 	- IA64 users currently suffer from the lack of a solid, 
> > high-performance, easy-to-use open-source compiler. There are some good 
> > open-source compilers (ORC, IMPACT) but these break like twigs, and 
> > aren't really intended for production use. There's GCC which is 
> > _reasonably_ solid these days but the performance ranges from poor to 
> > underwhelming. I'm hoping that llvm-gcc will become an alternative for 
> > those who can't/won't use the Intel or HP compilers.
> > 
> > 	Duraid
> > 
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