llvm dev - Oct 2014 - [LLVMdev] LLVM features that ought to be surfaced in a higher-level language?

I've been out of touch with the LLVM community for a few years, and so I
haven't kept up on all of the changes and improvements that have been added
lately. I've been wondering if someone on this list would care to summarize
what features of LLVM would be appropriate to expose as features of
languages built on top of LLVM. In other words, if you were building a new
LLVM-based language for general programming, how your language's feature
set be affected by the capabilities already in LLVM? I'm focusing on
language, and not compiler, features - so for example "faster code" is
a
compiler feature which doesn't usually affect the design of the language.

-- 
-- Talin
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Some things come to mind:

- the patchpoint and stackmap intrinsics used by WebKit

- I added 'musttail', which can now be combined with varargs to
implement a
perfectly forwarding function that can modify some prefix of the arguments

- comdat groups are now explicit in the IR, so if you have mergeable C++
template-like constructs you can now group related things together

On Mon, Oct 6, 2014 at 11:08 AM, Talin <viridia at gmail.com> wrote:
> I've been out of touch with the LLVM community for a few years, and so
I
> haven't kept up on all of the changes and improvements that have been
added
> lately. I've been wondering if someone on this list would care to
summarize
> what features of LLVM would be appropriate to expose as features of
> languages built on top of LLVM. In other words, if you were building a new
> LLVM-based language for general programming, how your language's
feature
> set be affected by the capabilities already in LLVM? I'm focusing on
> language, and not compiler, features - so for example "faster
code" is a
> compiler feature which doesn't usually affect the design of the
language.
>
> --
> -- Talin
>
> _______________________________________________
> LLVM Developers mailing list
> LLVMdev at cs.uiuc.edu         http://llvm.cs.uiuc.edu
> http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/mailman/listinfo/llvmdev
>
>
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On Oct 6, 2014, at 11:08 AM, Talin <viridia at gmail.com> wrote:
> I've been out of touch with the LLVM community for a few years, and so
I haven't kept up on all of the changes and improvements that have been
added lately. I've been wondering if someone on this list would care to
summarize what features of LLVM would be appropriate to expose as features of
languages built on top of LLVM. In other words, if you were building a new
LLVM-based language for general programming, how your language's feature set
be affected by the capabilities already in LLVM? I'm focusing on language,
and not compiler, features - so for example "faster code" is a
compiler feature which doesn't usually affect the design of the language.
Hi Talin,

What specifically are you asking about here?  Are you asking what LLVM features
(e.g. arbitrary sized integers) would be interesting to expose in source
languages?

With Swift as an example, we weren’t constrained by LLVM, we just nudged LLVM
and its infrastructure in the right direction over time.  As one dumb example,
Swift is why llvm::SourceMgr supports caret diagnostics, ranges and fixit hints.

-Chris

On 6 Oct 2014, at 19:29, Reid Kleckner <rnk at google.com> wrote:
> - I added 'musttail', which can now be combined with varargs to
implement a perfectly forwarding function that can modify some prefix of the
arguments
I missed this when it went in.  Does it rely on the target having the same
calling convention for variadic and non-variadic functions?

David