[llvm-dev] [RFC] Lanai backend

[David Chisnall via llvm-dev]

On 10 Feb 2016, at 07:50, Sean Silva via llvm-dev <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
> 
> Sparc/ - If you have deep enough pockets Oracle will sell you servers. You can probably find something workstation-y on ebay (talk to netbsd folks apparently http://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/sparc/ http://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/sparc64/). You can also probably synthesize OpenSPARC for an FPGA setup in the <$10,000 range.

QEMU also has good SPARC support - and given the price of Oracle kit and the other constraints of stuff like LEON, you probably get higher performance per dollar running QEMU on x86 to test generated SPARC code.

> SystemZ/ - If you have deep enough pockets IBM will sell you one.

Hercules can run z/Architecture Linux.  Much slower than QEMU, but useable and more than adequate for testing code.

On 9 Feb 2016, at 22:37, Chris Lattner via llvm-dev <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:

> 1) I imagine that there is a big win for you, not having to merge with mainline.  Maintaining an out of tree backend is a pain :-)

I wonder if maintaining an out-of-tree backend would be less painful if more people, particularly people employed by companies that also employ a lot of people who work on the rest of LLVM, did it.

David