[LLVMdev] Potential Google Summer of Code Applicant

[Michael Thorpe]

Hi,

I'm currently working for the next 6 months, but I would be very interested in looking into this. Are there any discussions in this mailing list that would be useful in finding out more information?

Regards

Michael Thorpe
Internet Services Developer
Netcraft Ltd


-----Original Message-----
From: llvmdev-bounces at cs.uiuc.edu [mailto:llvmdev-bounces at cs.uiuc.edu] On Behalf Of Yiannis Tsiouris
Sent: 06 April 2012 09:25
To: llvmdev at cs.uiuc.edu
Subject: Re: [LLVMdev] Potential Google Summer of Code Applicant

On 4/6/12 2:21 AM, Talin wrote:
> I would really like to see someone work on LLVM's garbage collection 
> support - it hasn't been updated in 4 years, and while there's been a 
> lot of talk about ways that it could be improved, there's been no action.
That is *sooo* true! :-) I'm one of the authors of an LLVM backend for Erlang (ErLLVM [1]); we have tested and measured our backend  and noticed that with the current GC infrastructure we see 20-40% performance degradation (because of the loads/stores on the stack for all gcroots). It is clear to me and the rest of the team that with this infrastructure the LLVM might not be suitable for languages with explicit garbage collection, like Erlang. I've also studied the way the Vmkit project handles GC and they seem to face the same deficiency too.

offtopic: I am working on an email (more like an RFC) with all the details and patches to the LLVM project in order to support our Erlang backend. I hope I will be able to send it by next week. Note, that we have already talked with the Ericsson/OTP team about integrating our work in a future release of Erlang/OTP (as a new HiPE backend).

Yiannis

[1]: http://erllvm.softlab.ntua.gr

--
Yiannis Tsiouris
Ph.D. student,
Software Engineering Laboratory,
National Technical University of Athens
WWW: http://www.softlab.ntua.gr/~gtsiour

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