LLVM Weekly - #69, Apr 27th 2015 =============================== If you prefer, you can read a HTML version of this email at <http://llvmweekly.org/issue/69>. Welcome to the sixty-ninth 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](http://asbradbury.org). 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 at asbradbury.org>, or @llvmweekly or @asbradbury on Twitter. ## News and articles from around the web Ed Jones at Embecosm has written about his work to [use the GCC regression suite on Clang](http://www.embecosm.com/2015/04/21/flexible-runtime-testing-of-llvm-on-embedded-systems/) and documented how to run the LLVM test suites on an embedded target. GCC 5.1 has now [been released](http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gcc.devel/139625). Congratulations to the GCC team. The versioning scheme is potentially confusing - 5.0 is the development version which saw a stable release as 5.1. The next minor releases will be 5.2, 5.3 etc and the next major release will be 6.1 (referred to as 6.0 during development). ## On the mailing lists * Sanjoy Das has posted an RFC on [supporting implicit null checks](http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.compilers.llvm.devel/84837) in LLVM. This is intended to support managed languages like Java, C#, or Go where a null check is required before using pointers. * Alex L interned at Apple last year, and is interning again this summer. He's [posted to the list](http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.compilers.llvm.devel/84778) about his project, which is to develop a text-based human readable format that allows LLVM to serialize the machine-level IR. The intention is to make debug and testing easier. He welcomes any feedback or suggestions. * libunwind is [moving](http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.compilers.llvm.devel/84895) to its own repository. Hopefully a git mirror will go live soon. * Roel Jordans gave a talk at EuroLLVM this year about his software pipelining pass. He has [posted to the mailing list](http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.compilers.llvm.devel/84852) to give a few more details and share his source code. * Tom Stellard is looking to [increase the number of code owners](http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.compilers.llvm.devel/84728), i.e. the set of people who review patches or approve merge requests to stable branches on a certain part of the code. His plan is to start nominating new code owners based on git history whenever he gets a new stable merge request for an unowned component. ## LLVM commits * Functions can now have metadata attachments. [r235785](http://reviews.llvm.org/rL235785). * The stack object allocation for Hexagon has been completely overhauled. [r235521](http://reviews.llvm.org/rL235521). * The vim support files have been updated. Changes include a new indentation plugin for .ll files. [r235369](http://reviews.llvm.org/rL235369). * llvm-link learned the `-override` option to override linkage rules. [r235473](http://reviews.llvm.org/rL235473). * There is now textual IR support for an explicit type parameter to the invoke instruction (much like for the call instruction). [r235755](http://reviews.llvm.org/rL235755). ## Clang commits * Documentation has been added for SanitizerCoverage (simple code coverage using the Sanitizer tools). [r235643](http://reviews.llvm.org/rL235643). * Clang's `__attribute__((aligned))` can now set alignment to a target-specific value, rather than just assuming 16 bytes on all platforms. [r235397](http://reviews.llvm.org/rL235397). ## Other project commits * lld now understands `--discard-locals`. [r235357](http://reviews.llvm.org/rL235357). * lldb's 'operation' and 'monitor' threads on Linux have been merged in to one. [r235304](http://reviews.llvm.org/rL235304). * It's now possible to build compiler-rt for MIPS with gcc. [r235299](http://reviews.llvm.org/rL235299). * libunwind seems to have been moved into its own project. [r235759](http://reviews.llvm.org/rL235759).