[LLVMdev] Question from a passer-by

[armencho at gmail.com]

Hi all,

Was wondering what is the real benefit of say translating from LLVM's
RISC-type instruction set to the x86 which is a more CISC type of
design? Especially after emitting said RISC stream from a much
higher-level language like say C or C++? I always thought that to
efficiently translate logic, as much as possible information has to be
retained down the translation chain? Would that not make the opposite
case when first human logic in form of C/C++ is grinded into much
smaller LLVM primitives, which then have to be assembled (translated)
to the a "larger grained" x86 instruction set with more complex
instructions, not to mention the MMX/SIMD subset. How does LLVM solve
the problem of optimizing translation from a set of smaller primitives
into a set of larger primitives?

Thanks.