[LLVMdev] Questions about LLVM

[Camille Troillard]

Dear list,
I am learning LLVM and would like to add JIT support to the F-Script
language.  F-Script is a Smalltalk like scripting language that lives in the
Objective-C runtime.  It is written by Philippe Mougin.

The goal is for me to become more familiar with LLVM, and learn about the
conclusions we can draw in terms performance improvements (or degradation
!), possible optimizations, etc.  So far, I have followed with great
interest the Kaleidoscope tutorial, this gave me an initial idea of what
needs to be accomplished.

In F-Script everything is represented as an Objective-C object.
When a block is parsed, a AST representation is built and then interpreted.
 The mechanics of interpretation are rather complicated, and for a start, I
would like to stay way from that.  Thus, I have chosen to JIT only
expressions, but not blocks (yet).

My question are:

1. Do you think it would make sense to use the clang codebase (specifically
Objective-C CodeGen / CGObjCRuntime) in order to generate the code that will
replace F-Script's interpretation?  If that is possible it would enable me
to start progressively porting F-Script to LLVM, instead of reinventing the
wheel and port everything at once.

2. If the previous answer is yes, can you point me to some code
where CGObjCRuntime is used?

3. If the previous answer is no, do you have a suggestion for an alternative
approach?


Thank you in advance for your help!


Best Regards,
Camille
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