Comment by saagarjha
3 years ago
And pay the price, there are tons of places that are stuck with some ossified “LLVM 3.2” toolchain or similar because they build their stuff on an unstable IR.
3 years ago
And pay the price, there are tons of places that are stuck with some ossified “LLVM 3.2” toolchain or similar because they build their stuff on an unstable IR.
Yea and again, I said "if". We live on the else branch of that if statement.
My point is that a lot of this sentiment is treating C as the portable backend of a compiler because there is no portable front end. It holds us back in a lot of ways from iterating on systems languages in ways that are interesting and valuable.
Ideally there would be an IR with stable textual and binary format that can be compiled into the machine code for various ISAs and support the extensions necessary by silicon manufacturers for the exotic bits. I've used exotic tool chains for weird ISAs where the exotic bits are sugar added to a GCC front end, and it always feels wrong and limiting.