[LLVMdev] Several questions about LLVM

[Bill Wendling]

Hi Eduardo,

On Fri, Oct 31, 2008 at 2:29 PM, Eduardo Brito <pg12188 at alunos.uminho.pt> wrote:
> I'm new to LLVM but I see lots of potential on it for something that I'm
> working on.
> I have a few questions about it:
>
> 1) I know there is a MSIL backend which is still at an experimental
> phase. When will it be ready? The same question for the MIPS backend.

These platforms currently don't have active developers. So there isn't
a projected date for when they will be ready.

> 2) Is there any plan or work being done to implement a Java backend?

None at the moment. However, there is the VMKit project
(http://vmkit.llvm.org/) that uses LLVM technologies to implement the
Java and CLI VMs.

> 3) I saw the passes feature. I think this can be very useful to
> implement a weaver for Aspect Oriented Programming. Once again, I ask if
> anybody is working on this or if there is already a AOP tool that can be
> used with llvm bitcode.

Not that I'm aware of. . .

> 4) For the work that I'm doing, besides C and C++, it would be great to
> have a Fortran frontend. Would it be very hard to compile the llvm-gcc
> with suport for fortran?
>
That's being actively worked on by people right now. I believe that
you can compile it on a Linux box but not on a Mac box. I don't know
about other platforms.

-bw