[LLVMdev] Status of Elsa->LLVM

[Richard Pennington]

Chris Lattner wrote:
> On Dec 21, 2007, at 1:08 PM, Richard Pennington wrote:
> 
>> I'm a little further along now. I've started to put together a simple
>> driver for Elsa and LLVM that I'm calling "ellsif" (cute name, I think
>> it works).
>>
>> The file being compiled is a "printf" function. Here are timing  
>> results
>> for optimized and unoptimized runs:
> 
> Cool, this is very nice!
> 
>> Sorry to add noise to the list with this. I'm just very excited. ;-)
>> Again, my compliments to both the Elsa and LLVM teams. It says a lot
>> that I got this far in 19 days of part-time work.
> 
> This is a very cool hack, but I'm curious: what is your goal with this  
> work?  Are you just trying to see if it can be done, or does elsa  
> provide an advantage over using the g++ parser with llvm?
> 
> -Chris
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> 
Well, primarily I'm doing it for fun.

My background is in compiler design and embedded systems programming, so 
I'm interested in both the front end and back end aspects.

I've build gcc many times over the years for different target processors 
and was never able to get my head around it internally. It is incredibly 
complex. I also didn't like the fact that I had to have N copies of gcc 
to support N processors.

I became interested in Elsa (via google) because I liked its extensible 
nature. I can drop in new syntax rules easily. It was also fairly easy 
to understand.

At first I looked into SUIF and started down that path. I wasn't 
entirely pleased with the results. Then I realized SUIF had been dead 
for about 5 years so I started looking around for alternatives and 
stumbled on LLVM.

It was easy to lower the Elsa AST to LLVM by using Elsa's extension 
capability.

I'm now at the point where I can see that compiling C with Elsa is a 
done deal. I have about 90% (or more) of basic C covered.

I decided that I wanted a cleaner way to move forward so I started 
writing the ellsif driver to automate the steps and make Elsa->LLVM look 
like a real tool.

Does Elsa provide an advantage over g++? For me, understanding it is a 
big plus. ;-) In addition, Elsa has a Berkeley-like license which I prefer.

I'll let you know if Elsa is a good choice after I get a little further 
along adding the C++ support.

Since I only have a few weeks invested in this project, I won't feel too 
bad if Elsa turns out to be a dead end. Along the way I found LLVM, 
which is definitely the way to go.

I'd like to get the Elsa stuff behind me because I'm itching to do an 
LLVM code generator for the Altera Nios2. ;-) I started by copying the 
MIPS sources and am studying them to get a feel for what's required.

-Rich