[LLVMdev] Introduction for new consumer of LLVM

[Robinson, Paul]

Howdy, John!  Small world and all that...

>From what I remember of GEM IL, translating to LLVM IR should be reasonable.  Looking forward to your presentation in the fall!
--paulr

From: llvmdev-bounces at cs.uiuc.edu [mailto:llvmdev-bounces at cs.uiuc.edu] On Behalf Of John Reagan
Sent: Wednesday, January 14, 2015 2:34 PM
To: llvmdev at cs.uiuc.edu
Subject: [LLVMdev] Introduction for new consumer of LLVM

Hello,

I'd like to introduce myself, my company, and our upcoming use of LLVM.

My name is John Reagan. I've been working on compilers and assemblers since 1983 (yes, 31 years).  Most of that time was spent on compilers for VAX/VMS (later renamed to OpenVMS), then OpenVMS on Alpha, and OpenVMS on Itanium.  I've also worked with the HP NonStop platform and was directly involved with the compilers for its upcoming port to x86.

OpenVMS ended up at Hewlett-Packard after Digital was sold to Compaq, and Compaq was sold to Hewlett-Packard.  HP transitioned OpenVMS to an engineering organization in India.  A new company called VMS Software Inc (VSI) was founded and we've licensed back the OS and layered products for future enhancement.  That includes a port to the x86-64 platform. We have chosen to use the LLVM compiler infrastructure for our port to x86.

OpenVMS has a large family of compilers that we will be porting onto x86.  That includes BASIC, COBOL, Fortran, Pascal, C, BLISS (one of the OpenVMS implementation languages), and Macro32 (a compiler that accepts VAX assembly source code and emits object code for the appropriate target, either Alpha or Itanium).  On Alpha and Itanium, we use our own multi-language, retargetable backend called GEM.  Our strategy will be to write a converter between the GEM IL and the LLVM IL.  We will first be hosting the x86-target compilers as cross-compilers running on OpenVMS Itanium to bootstrap the OS and eventually the compilers themselves onto a future OpenVMS x86 platform. I suspect we will be contributing several interesting enhancements as we go along. We also intend to provide clang as well for our C++ offering.

I've been reading as much as I can and doing lots of preliminary design and prototyping.  I've been very impressed with the online documentation (only found one broken link so far) and the infrastructure in general.

I might be asking lots of simple questions, but I hope everybody can put up with me. :)

I also plan on submitting a paper for this fall's developer's conference.

Please feel free to ask questions, etc.

John Reagan

John dot Reagan at vmssoftware dot com
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