[LLVMdev] Suggestion for VM porting to LLVM

Gabriele Farina
Sun, 05 Apr 2009 07:31:37 -0000

Hi Jon,

I've read your articles about HLVM, and that was one of the reasons
that convinced me to try out LLVM. Actually my VM has been implemented
in C++, but as long as it is not extremely complex, I might port it to
OCaml that sounds more compact for this kind of programs. Did you find
any significant performance loss when using OCaml over C++ ? Runtime
performance is quite important in my situation.

Gabriele


Il giorno 04/apr/09, alle ore 19:46, Jon Harrop ha scritto:

> On Saturday 04 April 2009 09:20:21 Gabriele Farina wrote:
>> - generate IR from my complier;
>> - build a VM that converts at runtime my bytecode to IR and
>> executes it;
>>
>> I largely prefer the second option because it would be great if I can
>> continue to use to old programs without having to recompile them.
>>
>> Which approach do you suggest ? are there any alternatives ?
>
> I've done something similar with HLVM, albeit for a new VM that uses
> a new
> representation. I found the combination of OCaml and LLVM to work
> extremely
> well. OCaml makes it very easy to manipulate programs and its LLVM
> bindings
> make it very easy to JIT compile and execute native code. My entire VM
> (including GC) is only 1kLOC.
>
> --
> Dr Jon Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd.
> http://www.ffconsultancy.com/?e
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