[LLVMdev] Contributing the Apple ARM64 compiler backend

Eric Christopher
Fri, 28 Mar 2014 21:24:20 -0000

>
> Getting to that idillic end-state of one AArch64 backend in the tree which
encompasses the best of both is going to take a fair bit of work and a lot of
discussion amongst the interested parties. To get there, I think a rough roadmap
like the following makes sense:
>
> 1. Import the ARM64 backend into the public tree so it's easily
accessible for everyone to investigate.
> 2. Test it. Benchmark it. Explore it. Get data for the community to work
with about the state of the back end. ARM has some excellent data that will help
guide us here.
> 3. Identify the core backend to build on and to merge features and tuning
from the other to. The data I have seen so far leads me to believe ARM64 is the
correct choice here, but that's a decision primarily for the contributors
above.
> 4. Clean up the codebase (C++11-ify it, for example), fix any regressions
and test failures identified in benchmarking.
>

Sounds great. It'd be good to get the target independent bits applied
separately (hopefully after the arm64 backend is committed so that
tests are more obvious), but I'm in favor of committing this as soon
as you can type svn ci with the appropriate splits for patches.

-eric