[llvm-dev] Email list just for front end developers?

Sun May 7 08:07:25 PDT 2017

2nd try to sent this email. ^^
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@Perry:
Thank you so much for reading and mentioning my beginner post here in 
the mailing list. Let us work together: Additional mailing list, wiki, 
usefull Q&A, tutorials - everything which helps newbies would be fine 
for me to work on. :)

@All:
I am the author of the post Perry mentioned and I would love to see help 
on my newbie questions, an "API usage" wiki or a Q&A with beginner´s 
questions on the usage of the LLVM API. Before I posted, I tried to read 
as much as possible in blog articles and tutorials about the LLVM API, 
but most of my questions were still open (I also read the C++, Rust, 
Java, Lua, Python stuff, because C examples are very rare). My last hope 
was the mailling list here in end of march 2017. Since my post, I paused 
my project, because I had no clue how to continue. I planned until March 
a bloody beginner tutorial on how to use LLVM API with C (variables, 
arrays, assignments, loops, if-then-else, structs, functions, 
parameters, heap /stack allocation, use of std functions, classes, 
exeptions, etc.).

The tutorials I found were often too small (just a simple int function 
which delivers 42 and had no parameters or real body/block stuff), over 
ten years old and totally deprecated or detailed, but with too less 
focus on the LLVM API part (complex parser in C++, different approaches 
for scanner in C++ and at the end just a few lines of LLVM API for the 
IR generation).

Please see the beginner problems from a LLVM API perspective:
It is very, very, very, very easy to find information in the internet 
about planning and creating a new programming language (lexing, 
scanning, error reporting, etc.), that is not the problem here. You 
hardly find no good explanation on how to use the LLVM API for 
generating the final IR. If you can not find infos about this last step, 
continuing with an own programming language does not make any sense, 
because writing an own compiler backend instead of using the LLVM API is 
nonsense, because we have this awesome LLVM, we just had no clue how to 
use its API.

Best regards,
Thomas

Am 07.05.2017 06:38 schrieb Sanjoy Das via llvm-dev:
> Hi Perry,
> 
> On Sat, May 6, 2017 at 2:55 PM, Perry E. Metzger <perry at piermont.com> 
> wrote:
>>> Let me put it this way -- I'm pretty sure if you take it on yourself
>>> to answer beginner questions on llvm-dev promptly, nobody will
>>> *complain*.  In fact, you're going to make some folks happy. :)
>> 
>> Sure, but who will answer mine? Part of the reason I asked about
>> this was selfish, as I'd like access to other people in the same
>> situation as me who might know answers. (I don't think the people here
>> now will want to answer more questions, and many of my questions
>> doubtless border on inanely stupid but for the fact that it is hard
>> to find answers in the docs.)
> 
> I don't see how people who don't have time to answer on llvm-dev will
> find time to answer on some other mailing list.
> 
>> That said, I'm willing to give it a try, as an experiment. How long
>> should we attempt it for? If that's reasonably agreed to, I'll
> 
> Depends on how much time you have -- that's the limiting resource here.
> 
> However, I liked your idea of maintaining a wiki-like thing.  Both
> http://llvm.org/docs/Frontend/PerformanceTips.html and
> http://llvm.org/docs/tutorial/ will be good additions there.
> 
>> personally give it a good faith effort myself during the period. (I'm
>> not sure I will be able to help with more than a fraction of the
>> questions, being very new at this myself, but I'll do my best.)
> 
> Thanks!
> -- Sanjoy
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