[LLVMdev] java frontend

[Duncan Sands]

On 26/07/12 14:59, Rafael Espíndola wrote:
> On 26 July 2012 08:45, George Baah <georgebaah at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi Folks,
>>    Is a java frontend still being developed for llvm?
>
> Closest thing I know is gcj + dragonegg, but it is a lot of work to be
> done in gcj before it works with dragonegg.

the main issue I know about is that gcj wants to output constructors and
destructors directly to the assembly file, and completely bypasses gcc's
generic machinery for this (probably because gcj predates that machinery).
This is one reason why you can't do link-time optimization with gcc (which
relies on everything going through the generic gcc machinery) and is also why
java compiled with dragonegg doesn't work (generated assembler lacks
constructors/destructors).  In my opinion this wouldn't be too hard to fix.

Another issue with gcj is that it's unmaintained (AFAIK), which probably also
explains why it was never updated to support LTO.

Ciao, Duncan.