LLVM Weekly - #49, Dec 8th 2014

Welcome to the forty-ninth 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

Most of the 2014 LLVM Developers' Meeting videos and slides are now online. Sadly, there are no videos from the talks by Apple employees yet. Hopefully they'll be appearing later.

QuarksLab has a rather nice write-up of deobfuscating an OLLVM-protected program.

The LLVM-based ELLCC has been making progress on ELK, a bare-metal POSIX-like environment.

Support for statepoints landed in LLVM this week, and Philip Reames has a blog post detailing some notes and caveats. See also the mailing list discussion linked to below about future plans for GC in LLVM.

On the mailing lists

LLVM commits

The statepoint infrastructure for garbage collection has landed. See the final patch in the series for documentation. r223078, r223085, r223137, r223143.

The LLVM assembler gained support for ARM's funky modified-immediate assembly syntax. r223113.

The OCaml bindings now has a CMake buildsystem. r223071.

The PowerPC backend gained support for readcyclecounter on PPC32. r223161.

Support for 'prologue' metadata on functions has been added. This can be used for inserting arbitrary code at a function entrypoint. This was previously known as prefix data, and that term has been recycled to be used for inserting data just before the function entrypoint. r223189.

PowerPC gained a Power8 instruction schedule definition r223257.

Clang commits

LLVM IR for vtable addresses now uses the type of the field being pointed to, to enable more optimisations. r223267.

New attributes have been added to specify AMDGPU register limits. This is a performance hint that can be used to attempt to limit the number of used registers. r223384.

Clang gained the __has_declspec_attribute preprocessor macro. r223467.

__has_attribute now only looks for GNU-style attributes. You should be able to use __has_cpp_atribute or __has_declspec_attribute instead. r223468.

Other project commits