[LLVMdev] Status of Elsa->LLVM

[Richard Pennington]

Chris Lattner wrote:
> On Dec 22, 2007, at 2:40 AM, Richard Pennington wrote:
> 
>> 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.
> 
> Ok.  If you're not planning on extending the front-end,  
> understandability doesn't really matter ;-).  I get where you're  
> coming from though!
> 
>> 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.
> 
> Ok.  For most users to be interested in it, it would have to be faster  
> or produce better code, and be as correct as G++.  I'll be interested  
> to see how it comes out.
> 

Me, too.

>> 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.
> 
> Ah, nifty.  I no nothing of that processor, but you can build a  
> backend independent of the front-end :)

The Nios2 is a softcore processor running in Altera FPGAs. Very MIPS 
like. Being soft, the instruction set can be extended as can the 
hardware. In software. Very cool.

-Rich