This document contains the release notes for the LLVM Compiler Infrastructure, release 2.7. Here we describe the status of LLVM, including major improvements from the previous release and significant known problems. All LLVM releases may be downloaded from the LLVM releases web site.
For more information about LLVM, including information about the latest release, please check out the main LLVM web site. If you have questions or comments, the LLVM Developer's Mailing List is a good place to send them.
Note that if you are reading this file from a Subversion checkout or the main LLVM web page, this document applies to the next release, not the current one. To see the release notes for a specific release, please see the releases page.
The LLVM 2.7 distribution currently consists of code from the core LLVM repository (which roughly includes the LLVM optimizers, code generators and supporting tools), the Clang repository and the llvm-gcc repository. In addition to this code, the LLVM Project includes other sub-projects that are in development. Here we include updates on these subprojects.
Previously announced in the 2.4, 2.5, and 2.6 LLVM releases, the Clang project also includes an early stage static source code analysis tool for automatically finding bugs in C and Objective-C programs. The tool performs checks to find bugs that occur on a specific path within a program.
In the LLVM 2.7 time-frame, the analyzer core has ...
The VMKit project is an implementation of a JVM and a CLI Virtual Machine (Microsoft .NET is an implementation of the CLI) using LLVM for static and just-in-time compilation.
VMKit version ?? builds with LLVM 2.7 and you can find it on its web page. The release includes bug fixes, cleanup and new features. The major changes are:
The new LLVM compiler-rt project is a simple library that provides an implementation of the low-level target-specific hooks required by code generation and other runtime components. For example, when compiling for a 32-bit target, converting a double to a 64-bit unsigned integer is compiled into a runtime call to the "__fixunsdfdi" function. The compiler-rt library provides highly optimized implementations of this and other low-level routines (some are 3x faster than the equivalent libgcc routines).
All of the code in the compiler-rt project is available under the standard LLVM License, a "BSD-style" license.
The new LLVM KLEE project is a symbolic execution framework for programs in LLVM bitcode form. KLEE tries to symbolically evaluate "all" paths through the application and records state transitions that lead to fault states. This allows it to construct testcases that lead to faults and can even be used to verify algorithms. For more details, please see the OSDI 2008 paper about KLEE.
The goal of DragonEgg is to make gcc-4.5 act like llvm-gcc without requiring any gcc modifications whatsoever. DragonEgg is a shared library (dragonegg.so) that is loaded by gcc at runtime. It ...
The LLVM Machine Code (MC) Toolkit project is ...
An exciting aspect of LLVM is that it is used as an enabling technology for a lot of other language and tools projects. This section lists some of the projects that have already been updated to work with LLVM 2.7.
Rubinius is an environment for running Ruby code which strives to write as much of the core class implementation in Ruby as possible. Combined with a bytecode interpreting VM, it uses LLVM to optimize and compile ruby code down to machine code. Techniques such as type feedback, method inlining, and uncommon traps are all used to remove dynamism from ruby execution and increase performance.
Since LLVM 2.5, Rubinius has made several major leaps forward, implementing a counter based JIT, type feedback and speculative method inlining.
MacRuby is an implementation of Ruby on top of core Mac OS X technologies, such as the Objective-C common runtime and garbage collector and the CoreFoundation framework. It is principally developed by Apple and aims at enabling the creation of full-fledged Mac OS X applications.
MacRuby uses LLVM for optimization passes, JIT and AOT compilation of Ruby expressions. It also uses zero-cost DWARF exceptions to implement Ruby exception handling.
Pure is an algebraic/functional programming language based on term rewriting. Programs are collections of equations which are used to evaluate expressions in a symbolic fashion. Pure offers dynamic typing, eager and lazy evaluation, lexical closures, a hygienic macro system (also based on term rewriting), built-in list and matrix support (including list and matrix comprehensions) and an easy-to-use C interface. The interpreter uses LLVM as a backend to JIT-compile Pure programs to fast native code.
Pure versions ??? and later have been tested and are known to work with LLVM 2.7 (and continue to work with older LLVM releases >= 2.3 as well).
LDC is an implementation of the D Programming Language using the LLVM optimizer and code generator. The LDC project works great with the LLVM 2.6 release. General improvements in this cycle have included new inline asm constraint handling, better debug info support, general bug fixes and better x86-64 support. This has allowed some major improvements in LDC, getting it much closer to being as fully featured as the original DMD compiler from DigitalMars.
Roadsend PHP (rphp) is an open source implementation of the PHP programming language that uses LLVM for its optimizer, JIT and static compiler. This is a reimplementation of an earlier project that is now based on LLVM.
Unladen Swallow is a branch of Python intended to be fully compatible and significantly faster. It uses LLVM's optimization passes and JIT compiler.
LLVM-Lua uses LLVM to add JIT and static compiling support to the Lua VM. Lua bytecode is analyzed to remove type checks, then LLVM is used to compile the bytecode down to machine code.
IcedTea provides a harness to build OpenJDK using only free software build tools and to provide replacements for the not-yet free parts of OpenJDK. One of the extensions that IcedTea provides is a new JIT compiler named Shark which uses LLVM to provide native code generation without introducing processor-dependent code.
This release includes a huge number of bug fixes, performance tweaks and minor improvements. Some of the major improvements and new features are listed in this section.
LLVM 2.7 includes several major new capabilities:
LLVM IR has several new features for better support of new targets and that expose new optimization opportunities:
In addition to a large array of minor performance tweaks and bug fixes, this release includes a few major enhancements and additions to the optimizers:
Also, -anders-aa was removed
We have put a significant amount of work into the code generator infrastructure, which allows us to implement more aggressive algorithms and make it run faster:
New features of the X86 target include:
New features of the PIC16 target include:
Things not yet supported:
New features of the ARM target include:
New features of other targets include:
This release includes a number of new APIs that are used internally, which may also be useful for external clients.
Other miscellaneous features include:
If you're already an LLVM user or developer with out-of-tree changes based on LLVM 2.6, this section lists some "gotchas" that you may run into upgrading from the previous release.
In addition, many APIs have changed in this release. Some of the major LLVM API changes are:
LLVM is known to work on the following platforms:
The core LLVM infrastructure uses GNU autoconf to adapt itself to the machine and operating system on which it is built. However, minor porting may be required to get LLVM to work on new platforms. We welcome your portability patches and reports of successful builds or error messages.
This section contains significant known problems with the LLVM system, listed by component. If you run into a problem, please check the LLVM bug database and submit a bug if there isn't already one.
The following components of this LLVM release are either untested, known to be broken or unreliable, or are in early development. These components should not be relied on, and bugs should not be filed against them, but they may be useful to some people. In particular, if you would like to work on one of these components, please contact us on the LLVMdev list.
The only major language feature of GCC not supported by llvm-gcc is the __builtin_apply family of builtins. However, some extensions are only supported on some targets. For example, trampolines are only supported on some targets (these are used when you take the address of a nested function).
If you run into GCC extensions which are not supported, please let us know.
The C++ front-end is considered to be fully tested and works for a number of non-trivial programs, including LLVM itself, Qt, Mozilla, etc.
The Llvm.Linkage module is broken, and has incorrect values. Only Llvm.Linkage.External, Llvm.Linkage.Available_externally, and Llvm.Linkage.Link_once will be correct. If you need any of the other linkage modes, you'll have to write an external C library in order to expose the functionality. This has been fixed in the trunk.
A wide variety of additional information is available on the LLVM web page, in particular in the documentation section. The web page also contains versions of the API documentation which is up-to-date with the Subversion version of the source code. You can access versions of these documents specific to this release by going into the "llvm/doc/" directory in the LLVM tree.
If you have any questions or comments about LLVM, please feel free to contact us via the mailing lists.