[llvm-dev] SPIRV-LLVM as an external tool

[Nicholas Wilson via llvm-dev]

On 21 Feb 2018, at 6:43 pm, Tomeu Vizoso <tomeu.vizoso at collabora.com<mailto:tomeu.vizoso at collabora.com>> wrote:

Yes, for compilers it would be much more convenient to have a backend, but what OpenCL implementations need (for example) is only a bidirectional converter.

Thankfully the difference between the two is a rather small amount of boiler plate, exposing passes vs. hooking the target infrastructure.
It is not difficult to have both, I have both at the moment.

I don't think anybody will oppose to the converter becoming a backend at some point (as long as we keep exposing the conversion passes as today), but at the current pace it will take years and I don't think it's fair for everybody that we keep this codebase in the limbo for much longer.

Good, true.

Currently there's people shipping this code in products, and have to carry heavily modified forks because there's no community upstream to contribute to.

Heh, tell me about it.


So, I think we really need at this point to find some place where the community can gather and work together on stability, intrinsics, have a proper backend, etc.

Indeed.

This proposal is only about where the collaboration would happen in the near future. If at some point we have also a backend, and people want to have it along the other backends in the main LLVM repo, that will be great. But in the meantime we need a place to work together.

Ah, that makes more sense.

We don’t need to have the project on LLVM to begin with (and I suspect it will be easier that way).
When it is more stable and feature complete we can have it as an official external project as a precursor to the main LLVM repo (review, etc.) and then split off the libclc-like bit into its own repo.

Nic
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