[LLVMdev] LLVM Weekly - #69, Apr 27th 2015

[Alex Bradbury]

LLVM Weekly - #69, Apr 27th 2015
================================

If you prefer, you can read a HTML version of this email at
<http://llvmweekly.org/issue/69>.

Welcome to the sixty-ninth issue of LLVM Weekly, a weekly newsletter
(published every Monday) covering developments in LLVM, Clang, and related
projects. LLVM Weekly is brought to you by [Alex
Bradbury](http://asbradbury.org). Subscribe to future issues at
<http://llvmweekly.org> and pass it on to anyone else you think may be
interested. Please send any tips or feedback to <asb at asbradbury.org>, or
@llvmweekly or @asbradbury on Twitter.


## News and articles from around the web

Ed Jones at Embecosm has written about his work to [use the GCC regression
suite on
Clang](http://www.embecosm.com/2015/04/21/flexible-runtime-testing-of-llvm-on-embedded-systems/)
and documented how to run the LLVM test suites on an embedded target.

GCC 5.1 has now [been
released](http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gcc.devel/139625).
Congratulations to the GCC team. The versioning scheme is potentially
confusing - 5.0 is the development version which saw a stable release as 5.1.
The next minor releases will be 5.2, 5.3 etc and the next major release will
be 6.1 (referred to as 6.0 during development).


## On the mailing lists

* Sanjoy Das has posted an RFC on [supporting implicit null
checks](http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.compilers.llvm.devel/84837) in
LLVM. This is intended to support managed languages like Java, C#, or Go where
a null check is required before using pointers.

* Alex L interned at Apple last year, and is interning again this summer. He's
[posted to the
list](http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.compilers.llvm.devel/84778) about
his project, which is to develop a text-based human readable format that
allows LLVM to serialize the machine-level IR. The intention is to make debug
and testing easier. He welcomes any feedback or suggestions.

* libunwind is
[moving](http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.compilers.llvm.devel/84895) to
its own repository. Hopefully a git mirror will go live soon.

* Roel Jordans gave a talk at EuroLLVM this year about his software pipelining
pass. He has [posted to the mailing
list](http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.compilers.llvm.devel/84852) to give
a few more details and share his source code.

* Tom Stellard is looking to [increase the number of code
owners](http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.compilers.llvm.devel/84728), i.e.
the set of people who review patches or approve merge requests to stable
branches on a certain part of the code. His plan is to start nominating new
code owners based on git history whenever he gets a new stable merge request
for an unowned component.


## LLVM commits

* Functions can now have metadata attachments.
[r235785](http://reviews.llvm.org/rL235785).

* The stack object allocation for Hexagon has been completely overhauled.
[r235521](http://reviews.llvm.org/rL235521).

* The vim support files have been updated. Changes include a new indentation
plugin for .ll files. [r235369](http://reviews.llvm.org/rL235369).

* llvm-link learned the `-override` option to override linkage rules.
[r235473](http://reviews.llvm.org/rL235473).

* There is now textual IR support for an explicit type parameter to the invoke
instruction (much like for the call instruction).
[r235755](http://reviews.llvm.org/rL235755).


## Clang commits

* Documentation has been added for SanitizerCoverage (simple code coverage
using the Sanitizer tools). [r235643](http://reviews.llvm.org/rL235643).

* Clang's `__attribute__((aligned))` can now set alignment to a
target-specific value, rather than just assuming 16 bytes on all platforms.
[r235397](http://reviews.llvm.org/rL235397).


## Other project commits

* lld now understands `--discard-locals`.
[r235357](http://reviews.llvm.org/rL235357).

* lldb's 'operation' and 'monitor' threads on Linux have been merged in to
one. [r235304](http://reviews.llvm.org/rL235304).

* It's now possible to build compiler-rt for MIPS with gcc.
[r235299](http://reviews.llvm.org/rL235299).

* libunwind seems to have been moved into its own project.
[r235759](http://reviews.llvm.org/rL235759).