LLVM Weekly - #120, Apr 18th 2016

Welcome to the one hundred and twentieth 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

This week has seen not one, but two articles about LLVM and profile-guided optimisation. Dig in John Engelen's article about optimising D's virtual function calls with PGO, then read Geoffroy Couprie's article about PGO with Rust.

The next Cambridge (UK) social will be at 7.30pm on April 20th, at the Cambridge Blue.

Alex Denisov has written a blog post around the idea of building a mutation testing system using LLVM.

On the mailing lists

LLVM commits

AtomicExpandPass learned to lower various atomic operations to __atomic_* library calls. The eventual aim is to move all atomic lowering from Clang to LLVM. r266115.

Targets can now define an inlining threshold multiplier, to e.g. increase the likelihood of inlining on platforms where calls are very expensive. r266405.

The ownership between DICompileUnit and DISubprogram has been reversed. This may break tests for your out-of-tree backend, but the commit has a link to a Python script to update your testcases. r266446.

llvm-readobj learned to print a histogram of an input ELF file's .gnu.hash . r265967.

More target-specific support for the Swift calling convention (on ARM, AARch64, and X86) has landed. Also, a callee save register is used for the swiftself parameter. r265997, r266251.

A new allocsize attribute has been introduced. This indicates the given function is an allocation function. r266032.

analyzeSiblingValues has been replaced with a new lower-complexity implementation in order to reduce compile times. r266162.

The AMDGPU backend gained a skeleton GlobalISel implementation. r266356.

Every use of getGlobalContext other than the C API has been removed. r266379.

Clang commits

Clang gained support for the GCC ifunc attribute. r265917.

The __unaligned type qualifier was implemented for MSVC compatibility. r266415.

Support for C++ core guideline Type.6: always initialize a member variable was completed in clang-tidy. r266191.

A new clang-tidy checker for suspicious sizeof expressions was added. r266451.

Other project commits