LLVM ist a mess

Posted Mar 21, 2024 10:06 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: LLVM ist a mess by Curan
Parent article: Cranelift code generation comes to Rust

> At least make the minor versions work across the board all the time.

Why should they do that and was there such a promise ever mentioned on their web site?

> Still get the some fails there, when some piece of software bundles their own LLVM and the system has a different one.

Yes, LLVM is designed around the idea that it would be bundled with a frontend. If you have other ideas then it's your responsibility to support them.

> NB: LLVM/clang is the standard compiler for eg. Mac OS via XCode.

Yes. And that pair have stable outer interfaces AFAIK.

> So either there needs to be a big fat warning at the top of all of LLVM that says "don't use my for production, I am a test environment" or LLVM needs to play ball.

It does do that if you use it according to it's design.

For a long time LLVM wasn't even designed to be used as shared library, but at some point Apple decided to change that. And they did. Now it's easier to embed LLVM into external projects as a shared library, but there are still no promises beyond that.

If you want something more than that then it's your responsibility to offer such solution.

> I want that commitment from LLVM. I do not care what they do internally. But their interfaces need to be stable enough.

But who would do the work to ensure that? That's non-trivial amount of work and AFAIK no one ever volunteered.