[LLVMdev] Couple newbie questions :|

[Marc B. Reynolds]

The other big issue to consider here is the memory footprint.  Maybe try
asking here: 

 
<http://lists.midnightryder.com/listinfo.cgi/sweng-gamedev-midnightryder.com
>
http://lists.midnightryder.com/listinfo.cgi/sweng-gamedev-midnightryder.com

Add add more details of exactly what you wish to do.

 


  _____  

From: llvmdev-bounces at cs.uiuc.edu [mailto:llvmdev-bounces at cs.uiuc.edu] On
Behalf Of Tres Walsh
Sent: Sunday, August 02, 2009 11:30 AM
To: LLVM Developers Mailing List
Subject: Re: [LLVMdev] Couple newbie questions :|


Thanks for the response :D

I have used Python and Lua before. I'd love to use the syntax of lua with
the object oriented ness of python, and I thought LLVM would be a way to do
that.
Again your help is appreciated.
On Sun, Aug 2, 2009 at 12:25 AM, Eli Friedman <eli.friedman at gmail.com>
wrote:


On Sat, Aug 1, 2009 at 11:43 PM, Tres Walsh<tres.walsh at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello there!
> I'm an absolute newb at LLVM,and I was hoping someone could answer a few
of
> my questions.
> I'm currently working on a game engine. As part of it's design, I need a
> virtual machine for scripts. Is LLVM suited for this at all? Such as
> registering external functions that can be called from the scripts?


Possibly... but you're sort of making the decision at the wrong level;
LLVM is really a low-level solution intended for implementing a
language.  If you need scripts, you probably want a scripting language
of some sort, and if you're working on a game engine, you probably
don't want to write your own scripting language, since it's a lot of
work with no obvious benefit.  There are numerous existing open-source
solutions for this; I think Python and Lua are popular choices for
that sort of thing.


> And if
> this did work, it wouldn't really matter what language the original
scripts
> were written in, since they all get compiled down to the LLVM bytecode
> correct?


You can't really just compile a scripting language down to LLVM
bitcode and expect good performance; you really need some glue code to
mix interpretation, compilation, and possibly recompilation at runtime
to get good performance.  And if the scripts in question aren't
performance-sensitive, there's not really much point to using LLVM.
It strongly depends on what you're doing.


> As of now what platforms does LLVM not compile on? Is it good for embedded
> work?


In terms of platforms, it'll probably work for everything you might
care about; see http://llvm.org/docs/ReleaseNotes-2.6.html#portability
(although note that only some of those platforms have working JIT
support).  As for embedded work, it depends on what you mean by
embedded; if 10MB code footprint sounds way too large, LLVM is
probably not the way to go.

You might want to take a look at http://llvm.org/docs/tutorial/ to get
a better idea of what LLVM can do.

-Eli
_______________________________________________
LLVM Developers mailing list
LLVMdev at cs.uiuc.edu         http://llvm.cs.uiuc.edu
http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/mailman/listinfo/llvmdev





-- 
http://treswalsh.com

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/attachments/20090802/8258c056/attachment.html>