[llvm-dev] PowerPC LLVM support much appreciated

[Andrew Chiw via llvm-dev]

There is a sizable Mac PowerPC community that also thinks that if Rust is
on m68k, then it should also be on Darwin PPC, seeing that it's already on
Darwin and PPC Linux.

Although speaking with Iain, it doesn't sound like it's actually a trivial
matter.

I think the problem is that nobody showed up to defend Rust on PPC Darwin
back then (and by extension, Go on PowerPC in a similar GitHub issue)
because the cultures are so different. On one side you have devs working
deep in large companies and using mailing lists and on the other side you
have users on Macrumors/Discord who have no idea how to voice their opinion
at crucial times like this.

If someone could onboard me to the scope of this problem in an efficient
way, I'd be happy to maintain and also provide docs to make it easy for
other devs to jump in and help maintain. Because the main problem here is
it's difficult to know what needs to be done, not enough people understand
systems programming at a low level to keep things alive for old systems
like this. As you know there are so many web devs these days on JS and the
like.

I also think it would be interesting to create an economy to incentivize
enthusiast development for obsolete platforms. For example, F at H's points
system gets people contributing even though they have no monetary value.
And there are Patreons for people like Hector Marcan and Rene Rebe. I just
think that it should be possible to incentivize and organize an entire
community, not just individuals.

But all this will come after a successful port of Rust over...

On Mon, 25 Oct 2021, 13:10 John Paul Adrian Glaubitz, <
glaubitz at physik.fu-berlin.de> wrote:

> Hi Nemanja!
>
> On 10/25/21 11:27, Nemanja Ivanovic wrote:
> > Bringing back support for Darwin/PowerPC is of course possible, but such
> > undertakings are not free. Aside from the effort to bring it back, there
> is
> > the effort of maintaining that support as the PowerPC back end continues
> to
> > be developed for supported platforms (Linux, AIX, FreeBSD). So in order
> to
> > consider bringing it back, we would really need to understand the use
> case
> > - now and in the future.
>
> I understand. But since both PowerPC and Darwin support are still there, I
> would
> assume that the changes in question aren't big at all. I just had a quick
> look
> and it looks like the majority of changes affects removing tests specific
> to
> Darwin/PowerPC [1] and some minor removal in the AsmPrinter code [2].
>
> I'm not a strong proponent of Darwin but I think those changes are
> relatively small.
>
> Adrian
>
> > [1]
> https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/commit/7c80f98b69a6a9ad027a3f4bfda073958141d977
> > [2]
> https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/commit/ebd26cc8c434f40fe8079ee823e7657b5138769f
>
> --
>  .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
> : :' :  Debian Developer - glaubitz at debian.org
> `. `'   Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz at physik.fu-berlin.de
>   `-    GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546  0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/attachments/20211025/edc1ed9a/attachment.html>