[LLVMdev] what is "intrinsic"?

[陳韋任 (Wei-Ren Chen)]

> i found the term "intrinsic" in some LLVM docs i am reading, and
> nowhere explains what that means.
> i did try to google, but nothing helpful came up. anybody please help?

  Let's me give it a try. You can think the term "intrinsic" means something
that can be considered as part of LLVM, but not as first-class member. For
example, LLVM IR likes add, sub, ret, ... etc are all first-class member
[1]. But sometimes we want to extend LLVM but leave other part of LLVM
unchanged, here comes "intrinsic" [2]. If time proves some intrinsic functions
are important enough, they can be turned into LLVM IR.

HTH,
chenwj

[1] http://llvm.org/docs/LangRef.html#instref
[2] http://llvm.org/docs/ExtendingLLVM.html

-- 
Wei-Ren Chen (陳韋任)
Computer Systems Lab, Institute of Information Science,
Academia Sinica, Taiwan (R.O.C.)
Tel:886-2-2788-3799 #1667
Homepage: http://people.cs.nctu.edu.tw/~chenwj