[llvm-dev] Bountysource campaign for the M68000 backend

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz via llvm-dev]

Hello!

Almost two years ago, Artyom Goncharov submitted an initial effort for a
backend for the Motorola 68000 architecture [1] which was eventually
not merged, unfortunately. I elaborated why I supported the idea of
such a backend [2].

Recently, we started a fundraising campaign on the platform Bountysource.com
to port the M68K backend in GCC to the new MODE_CC register representation
which was very successful collecting over $6000 in donations financing an
experienced GCC developer to complete the task in a short period [3].

Due to the success of the GCC campaign, people in the Amiga community are
wondering whether such a campaign would work for LLVM as well to complete
the M68000 backend started by Artyom [4] and maybe also get it merged
into LLVM upstream. The list of remaining tasks on the backend are tracked
in the issue tracker for the M68000 backend on Github.

I think such a backend has good chances of attracting maintainers and
developers as there is still a considerably large community around the
M68000 architecture. I recently learned that there are even people at
Google working on Amiga code in their free time.

What does the LLVM community think? Would it be okay in principle to start
such a fundraising campaign and would there be someone on the list interesting
on working on this project provided that we are able to collect enough
funds?

Thanks,
Adrian

> [1] https://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2018-August/125317.html
> [2] https://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2018-August/125325.html
> [3] https://www.bountysource.com/issues/80706251-m68k-convert-the-backend-to-mode_cc-so-it-can-be-kept-in-future-releases
> [4] https://github.com/M680x0/M680x0-llvm

-- 
 .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' :  Debian Developer - glaubitz at debian.org
`. `'   Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz at physik.fu-berlin.de
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