This document is meant to be a sort of "big TODO list" for LLVM. Each project in this document is something that would be useful for LLVM to have, and would also be a great way to get familiar with the system. Some of these projects are small and self-contained, which may be implemented in a couple of days, others are larger. Several of these projects may lead to interesting research projects in their own right. In any case, we welcome all contributions.
If you are thinking about tackling one of these projects, please send a mail to the LLVM Developer's mailing list, so that we know the project is being worked on. Additionally this is a good way to get more information about a specific project or to suggest other projects to add to this page.
The projects in this page are open-ended. More specific projects are filed as unassigned enhancements in the LLVM bug tracker. See the list of currently outstanding issues if you wish to help improve LLVM.
Improvements to the current infrastructure are always very welcome and tend to be fairly straight-forward to implement. Here are some of the key areas that can use improvement...
The LLVM bug tracker occasionally has "code-cleanup" bugs filed in it. Taking one of these and fixing it is a good way to get your feet wet in the LLVM code and discover how some of its components work.
It would be very useful to port glibc to LLVM. This would allow a variety of interprocedural algorithms to be much more effective in the face of library calls. The most important pieces to port are things like the string library and the stdio related functions... low-level system calls like 'read' should stay unimplemented in LLVM.
We are always looking for new testcases and benchmarks for use with LLVM. In particular, it is useful to try compiling your favorite C source code with LLVM. If it doesn't compile, try to figure out why or report it to the llvm-bugs list. If you get the program to compile, it would be extremely useful to convert the build system to be compatible with the LLVM Programs testsuite so that we can check it into CVS and the automated tester can use it to track progress of the compiler.
When testing a code, try running it with a variety of optimizations, and with all the back-ends: CBE, llc, and lli.
Sometimes creating new things is more fun than improving existing things. These projects tend to be more involved and perhaps require more work, but can also be very rewarding.
Many ideas for feature requests are stored in LLVM bugzilla. Just search for bugs with a "new-feature" keyword.
We have a strong base for development of both pointer analysis based optimizations as well as pointer analyses themselves. It seems natural to want to take advantage of this...
We now have a unified infrastructure for writing profile-guided transformations, which will work either at offline-compile-time or in the JIT, but we don't have many transformations. We would welcome new profile-guided transformations as well as improvements to the current profiling system.
Ideas for profile-guided transformations:
Improvements to the existing support: