[LLVMdev] [Neko] First proof of concept of a LLVM driven backend for the neko virtual machine

[Franco Ponticelli]

Great and very appreaciated news!
Out of curiosity, why have you decided to translate Neko to LLVM instead of
creating a new target for haXe?
This project is awesome ;)

Franco.

On Wed, May 19, 2010 at 3:06 PM, Asger Ottar Alstrup <asger at area9.dk> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Vadim Atlygin has been working on a LLVM backend for Neko, and we are
> happy to announce that "Hello world" works now.
>
> For LLVM readers, Neko is a tight virtual machine, which is primarily
> targetted by haXe. haXe is a statically typed programming language
> that has targets to JavaScript, Flash, as well as Neko. Both haXe and
> Neko are developed by Nicolas Cannasse, with contributions from many
> others. You can read more about haXe and Neko at www.haxe.org and
> www.nekovm.org.
>
> The current neko vm has a x86 JIT. The aim of this work is to get the
> Neko VM to run fast on 64 bit machines, and hopefully improve
> performance on 32 bit targets as well.
>
> You can get the code from this repository:
> http://github.com/vava/neko_llvm_jit
>
> The work is still incomplete - only the first 10 opcodes out of 66 are
> implemented, but there is enough to get "Hello world" and simple
> arithmetic to work. The current port is still slower than the existing
> VM, but that is expected. The next steps are to implement the rest of
> the opcodes. At first, we will just plug them up to use c callbacks,
> and then as a next step, convert them to real LLVM bytecodes later.
> Until we have real LLVM produced for the opcodes, it will be slower
> than the original VM.
>
> If you want to help out, you can contribute test cases for opcodes,
> implement c callback implementations for some of the opcodes, or even
> better optimized code for opcodes. We propose to use the Neko mailing
> list for discussion on this.
>
> Regards,
> Vadim Atlygin & Asger Ottar Alstrup
>
> --
> Neko : One VM to run them all
> (http://nekovm.org)
>
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