[LLVMdev] where to start?

[Hal Finkel]

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Baoshan Pang" <pangbw at gmail.com>
> To: llvmdev at cs.uiuc.edu
> Sent: Friday, January 31, 2014 8:15:26 AM
> Subject: [LLVMdev] where to start?
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Hi All,
> 
> 
> I am an experienced compiler engineer, I want to get involved in LLVM
> but don't know where I should start with. Can someone give any
> suggestion for my situation? I hope can do some easy work at
> beginning, then do some challenge work when I am familiar and
> comfortable with LLVM. I am interested in optimizations and code
> generations, but I am open to other areas either.
> 
> 
> Any suggestion is welcome, thanks in advance.
> 

My personal recommendation for getting started is this: find some applications or benchmarks that you feel like playing with: compile them with various compilers and fine some on which Clang/LLVM performs poorly; then figure out why. File bug reports and then start figuring out what parts of the compiler may need improvement. Running clang with -mllvm -print-after-all is often enlightning.

One area in which we really need some work is quantifying how various optimizations affect the performance of multithreaded applications. There was some discussion of this issue here (http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/llvmdev/2013-November/067998.html), as an example, but we really need a lot more effort in this area.

 -Hal

> 
> Regards,
> Baosan
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-- 
Hal Finkel
Assistant Computational Scientist
Leadership Computing Facility
Argonne National Laboratory