I have no faith in anyone doing AI to accomplish anything (especially relative to how much money they spend) except John Carmack. People should be trying to throw money at him
I don't know what point you're trying to make but your question was what's an alternative to llvm. People writing compilers always used C89 or a version of it (C11 allows an easier atomic implementation). There's a lot more C89 compilers than backends that llvm supports. When I was writing arduino code clang/llvm couldn't generate the AVR code for the board. The default toolchain was gcc with an AVR backend. IIRC it had optimizations and was the only reasonable compiler I could use. There's nothing wrong using C as your backend
I didn't say there was. Saying use C instead of LLVM is fine for a language designer.
But that doesn't make it a replacement for LLVM as a piece of infrastructure. C compilers still need an optimizing backend like LLVM.
The conversation is about whether or not LLVM is a shit piece of engineering, not whether you should target C or IR as a language designer. Avoiding using LLVM directly isn't a replacement lol.
You could say "GCC" is a replacement which at least isn't completely false, but GCC's backend is far more annoying to use for different languages.
You don't really need to deal with gcc backend. Most languages are expressible in C89. It'll obviously be less readable since generated lines look nothing like source lines but C89 beats llvm in most cases, especially if the C compiler supports assembly. I stuck to using intrinsics only because I heard of compilers producing worse code when it hits asm blocks since it can't understand it as well as intrinsics. I took out llvm last time it broke my compiler because it didn't add any value
IIRC, the Inmos Transputer shipped without a C compiler, and while third party products (including a port of GCC) did come later, it was Occam-only for quite some time.
Yes. I also written a compiler and I also complained about LLVM.
LLVM is
- Slow to compile
- Breaks compilers/doesn't have a stable ABI
- Optimizes poorly (at least, worse than GCC)
Swift I never used but I tried compiling it once and it was the bottom 2 slowest compiler I ever tested. The only thing nearly as bad was kotlin but 1) I don't actually remember which of these are worse 2) Kotlin wasn't meant to be a CLI compiler, it was meant to compile in the background as a language server so it was designed around that
Mojo... I have things I could say... But I'll stick to this. I talked to engineers there and I asked one how they expected any python developers to use the planned borrow checker. The engineer said "Don't worry about it" ie they didn't have a plan. The nicest thing I can say is they didn't bullshit me 100% of the time when I directly asked a question privately. That's the only nice or neutral thing I could say
IIRC go wasn't that fast but can feel like it in vscode. IIRC vscode compiles go using the lsp which is faster than launching a process because for some reason, vscode stalls for a second or more before launching a process.
I can't remember how fast D was but iirc it was fairly fast. Actual fastest is my compiler which I don't work on anymore and isn't ready for production. It's the only compiler I know of that hit millions of lines <1s in a non trivial language https://bolinlang.com/
On some compiler toolchains (IIRC MSVC was the main offender) you get a lot more code pulled into your source file when including a C stdlib header (like <stdio.h>) in C++ mode versus C mode. Basically a couple hundred lines in C mode versus thousands of lines in C++ mode.
I measured once and to my surprise templates aren't (directly) the reason for long compile times. It's function bodies in headers, and obviously templates are in headers and they call other templated functions/classes which explodes code generation and time. But if it's only a few lines and doesn't call other templated functions it's likely fine. I wrote about it here https://bolinlang.com/wheres-my-compile-time
After writing that, I wrote my own standard library (it has data structs like vector, hashmap and sets; slices, strings, rng, print, some io functions, and more) which uses a lot of templates, and it compiles in <200ms on both clang and gcc. Many standard library headers take much longer to compile than that. It's not a terrible idea to have your own standard lib if you need quick compile times.
Oh? I use a boring old $5 VPS (using nginx for https). There's no cloudflare or anything else involved. I wonder why that's happening. I may look into that this week
You could use io_uring but IMO that API is annoying and I remember hitting limitations. One thing you could do with io_uring is using openat (the op not the syscall) with the dir fd (which you get from the syscall) so you can asynchronously open and read files, however, you couldn't open directories for some reason. There's a chance I may be remembering wrong
It's not open source when you disallow people and companies from using it. One big difference between open source and public domain is that code in the public domain doesn't force anyone to redistribute the changes.
I have had several projects where I didn't want to be forked, especially by a company with a marketing budget. I choose not to distribute it with an open source license. There's nothing wrong with that. Companies have sold copies of source to people who paid, so that's an option. But I don't know of any licenses like that which have been written for the public to use (copying a company license is a copyright violation)
Every time I read his article I regret it. I literally mean every time, 100% of it. Judging by the title of the article, I didn't expect his reason to be "engineers working outside their area of expertise". I've seen good engineers figure out problems outside of their expertise plenty of times, so that's not a good reason either.
I feel like this article is the equivalent 16 paragraph stating you're likely to be correct only 10% of the time when you guess a random number from 1 to 10
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