[LLVMdev] gcc4 or gcc3?

[Reid Spencer]

Hi Hendrik,

On Mon, 2006-08-07 at 14:35 -0400, Hendrik Boom wrote:
> I just downloaded the CVS version of llvm and llvm-test.  Presumably
> this is the one that's scheduled to become 1.8 in a few days.

Not really. The current CVS head is quite a ways past release 1.8 at
this point. If you want to get the release 1.8 preview, please check out
the release_18 branch:

cvs co -rrelease_18 llvm

> 
> (1) To install llvm, do I really need the llvm version of the gcc front
> end? I have no special interest in yet another c/c++ conmpiler.

No, you can build LLVM without it. Some functionality will be disabled,
however (like the test cases for C/C++).

> 
> (2) If I need llvm gcc, will the binary version suffice, or do I need
> to compile the CVS version?

Binary version should be okay.

> (3) If I need its source code, does it properly fit within the
> llvm/projects directory, just like the test suite?  And it that where I
> should execute the cvs co, like like the test suite?  Or is it so
> independent that I should put it totally elsewhere in the file
> system?

It's independent, put it somewhere else :)

> (4) The page http://llvm.org/docs/GettingStarted.html#checkout says to get
> the gcc 3.4 source code.

The link above is for accessing llvm-gcc3 which was based on gcc 3.4
source code. 

> The instructions to compile it in http://llvm.org/docs/CFEBuildInstrs.html
> seem to deal in gcc 3 and gcc 4 instead.  Is this an error in the
> documentation, or does it indicate that I should compile the llvm-gcc 3.4
> source code with GNU's gcc versions 3 or 4 depending on what;'s already
> installed on my system.

No, its not an error. Perhaps what you're misunderstanding is that there
are two versions of llvm-gcc. The first, which we call llvm-gcc3, is
based on gcc 3.4 and you can get that via CVS or release tarball.  THe
second version, which we call llvm-gcc4, is based on gcc 4.0.1 and is
maintained by Apple. They were nice enough to provide a subversion
repository to access it.  In general, LLVM is slowly transitioning to
using the llvm-gcc4 front end. Currently its missing a couple features
(most notably exception handling in C++, compile time optimization), but
in general it is already easier to deal with because it works just like
GCC and doesn't require an llvm-based run-time library.  These
deficiencies will most likely get corrected in the near future (probably
by the end of the year or sooner). At that time, we'll probably
deprecate llvm-gcc3 (release 1.10?) and just use llvm-gcc4.

Note: this email contains forward-looking statements that I don't want
to be held accountable for, so read it with a grain of salt.  :)

Reid.