LLVM Weekly - #46, Nov 17th 2014

Welcome to the forty-sixth 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

Chrome on Linux now uses Clang for production builds. Clang has of course been used on OS X Chrome for quite some time. The switch saw reduction in binary size of ~8%, but this was vs GCC 4.6 rather than something more up-to-date.

The LLVM in HPC workshop at SC14 is taking place on Monday and the full agenda with abstracts is available online

On the mailing lists

Duncan P.N. Exon Smith has posted an RFC on splitting out metadata from the Value hierarchy. There seems to be general support for the idea. If you have concerns, now is the time to speak up.

Tom Stellard has posted a proposed LLVM/Clang 3.5.1 release schedule. RC1 is currently planned for November 26th.

Zachary Turner raised the issue referencing Apple rdar bugs in commit messages. The concern is that sometimes the commit messages are hard to work out without the context of the bug, which many of us do not have access to.

LLVM commits

Work on call lowering for MIPS FastISel has started. r221948.

Work has started on an assembler for the R600 backend. r221994.

A pass implementing forward control-flow integrity as been added. r221708.

A whole slew of patches that made MDNode a Value have been reverted due to a change in plan. The aim is now to separate metadata from the Value hierarchy. r221711.

There are two ways to inform the optimizer the result of a load is never null. Either with metadata or via assume. The latter is now canonicalized into the former. r221737.

vec_vsx_ld and vec_vsx_st intrinsics have been added for PowerPC. r221767.

PowerPC gained support for small-model PIC. r221791.

The llvm.arm.space intrinsic was added to make it easier to write tests for ARM ConstantIslands. r221903.

Clang commits

The constant trickle of OpenMP patches continues. Codegen for threadprivate variables has been added. r221663.

Support for __has_cpp_attribute is now present. r221991.

Other project commits