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The Design of LLVM (Dr. Dobb's)The Design of LLVM (Dr. Dobb's)Posted May 31, 2012 4:00 UTC (Thu) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582)In reply to: The Design of LLVM (Dr. Dobb's) by daglwn Parent article: The Design of LLVM (Dr. Dobb's)
I would change quite a bit of the software engineering, actually. So might Lattner if he were starting from scratch. But clearly they got a lot right, and now the benefits of fundamental changes are probably not worth the pain. There is a difference between a research compiler and a compiler that is used by several production platforms and dozens of serious projects. LLVM may not be the first modular compiler but it is the first to have a real-world impact.
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The Design of LLVM (Dr. Dobb's) Posted May 31, 2012 14:31 UTC (Thu) by daglwn (subscriber, #65432) [Link]
> So might Lattner if he were starting from scratch.
Some, yes, but not much as he has been asked about it before.
The leadership has no problem completely replacing or removing APIs so stability is not a problem. Users simply have to bear the pain. Pain does not seem to be a concern of the project. And that's fine. I completely understand why they choose to operate that way. I wouldn't want to be locked into a set of APIs either.
Certainly they did get a lot right. As for real-world impact, I suspect that something like MSVC is pretty modular and that Microsoft uses that to its advantage in Visual Studio. Of course we can't prove that.
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