[LLVMdev] gcc in c++

[Eli Friedman]

On Thu, Jul 3, 2008 at 9:09 AM, Devang Patel <dpatel at apple.com> wrote:
>> On Wed, Jul 2, 2008 at 7:00 PM, Mike Stump <mrs at apple.com> wrote:
>>> If we apply their logic to llvm, we can dominate, if we just target 8
>>> cores.  :-)
>
> Does this mean llvm can not dominate if llvm target 1 core machine
> also ?

Making an optimizer/code generator parallel is fundamentally a lot
easier than making a browser parallel because the problems parallelize
a lot more naturally.  There are essentially two chunks of code in the
llvm pipeline that take up large amounts of time: the optimization
passes and the code generator.  I think parallelizing both of these is
feasible with conventional parallelism techniques, with very little
penalty for the single-core case.

That said, that wasn't the point I was trying to make by linking to
that blog post; I was really trying to point in the direction of
building new programming tools with LLVM.  Parallelizing a web-browser
to many cores involves much more difficult issues.

-Eli