LLVM Weekly - #68, Apr 20th 2015

Welcome to the 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

Last week was of course EuroLLVM. It was good to put faces to names for a number of you, or to meet people I've only communicated with over twitter. Slides and videos should be forthcoming, but in the meantime you can read the liveblog I maintained for the talks I was able to attend. A big thank you to the organisers and all those who presented.

The highest profile news for some time in the LLVM community is that Microsoft are working on an LLVM-based compiler for .NET CoreCLR. What's more, LLILC (pronounced 'lilac') is open source, and they hope to contribute their LLVM changes upstream.

The Cerberus team are trying to find an answer to the question 'What is C in practice?, and you can help by filling out their survey.

Honza Hubička has posted a fantastic overview of the improvements to link-time and inter-procedural optimisations in GCC5, featuring figures from Firefox builds. It seems like impressive improvements have been made.

Simon Cook has written a blog post about using TableGen outside of LLVM, specifically for things like parameterisable SSH configs. Crazy? Genius? Why not both?

On the mailing lists

LLVM commits

The dereferenceable_or_null attribute has been born. As described in the commit message, the motivation is for managed languages such as Java. r235132.

A new layer was added to the Orc JIT API for applying arbitrary transforms to IR. r234805.

Memory intrinsics can now be tail calls. r234764.

A handy Python script has been added for generating C programs that have a control flow graph which is a ladder graph. The intent is to use it to test whether an algorithm expected to be linear time on the CFG really is. r234917.

The code for lowering switches and extracting jump tables has been rewritten, and should produce better results now. r235101.

Call can now take an explicit type parameter. r235145.

Clang commits

Clang learned -Wrange-loop-analysis , which will warn when a range-based for loop makes copies of elements in the range. r234804.

The preserve-bc-uselistorder option is no longer true by default, but Clang will set it for -emit-llvm or -save-temps . r234920.

LLVM has had a lot of changes to the debug API in the last week. This commit updates Clang for them. r235112.

Other project commits