LLVM Weekly - #268, February 18th 2019

Welcome to the two hundred and sixty-eighth issue of LLVM Weekly, a weekly newsletter (published every Monday) covering developments in LLVM, Clang, and related projects. LLVM Weekly is brought to you by Alex Bradbury. Subscribe to future issues at http://llvmweekly.org and pass it on to anyone else you think may be interested. Please send any tips or feedback to asb@asbradbury.org, or @llvmweekly or @asbradbury on Twitter.

News and articles from around the web

The early bird rate for EuroLLVM'19 ends on Feb 26th.

Phoronix have published a series of GCC 8/9 vs LLVM Clang 7/8 compiler benchmarks for AArch64.

On the mailing lists

The discussion on changing variable naming in the LLVM codebase continues, with discussions this week covering concerns about a transition plan.

Joel E. Denny proposes placing Clang's libraries in Clang-dedicated directories (within lib/clang instead of lib/).

Todd Snider kicked off an RFC thread on allowing global label definition through inline asm. James Y Knight suggests it would also be useful to expose what global symbols are defined by an asm statement.

Chris Bowler shared an RFC on adding LLVM support for AIX.

Philip Reames seeks clarification on the precise meaning of "must alias", which Chris Lattner provides.

Shiva Chen shared an RFC on passing a target module flag with LTO enabled. Specifically, whether to pass a new -msmall-data-limit (implemented for the RISC-V backend) using the LTO interface, module metadata, or represented in a different way in IR.

LLVM commits

Documentation was added detailing common recipes for migrating downstream branches of git mirrors to the new canonical monorepo hosted on GitHub. r353713.

AddressSanitizer was ported to the new pass manager. r353985.

Many PrintFatalError calls in tablegen now contain location information. r353862.

The AArch64 backend gained support for reserving arbitrary general purpose registers. r353957.

The RISC-V backend now supports assembling the la pseudoinstruction. r354111.

Clang commits

The ShadowCallStack documentation was updated. r353890.

Build and install targets were added for Clang libraries, similar to the llvm-libraries target. r354141.

Android ARM targets now default to NEON. r354166.

Other project commits