[LLVMdev] Introduction for new consumer of LLVM

Jim Grosbach
2015-01-14T23:55:32Z

Hi John,

Welcome to LLVM!

I have many (mostly fond, I promise!) memories of assembly programming on VAXen.
It will be fun seeing that come full circle with clang and LLVM.

In addition to the development lists, you may also find the IRC channel useful.

-Jim

> On Jan 14, 2015, at 2:34 PM, John Reagan <johnrreagan at
earthlink.net> wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> I’d like to introduce myself, my company, and our upcoming use of LLVM.
>
> My name is John Reagan. I’ve been working on compilers and assemblers since
1983 (yes, 31 years).  Most of that time was spent on compilers for VAX/VMS
(later renamed to OpenVMS), then OpenVMS on Alpha, and OpenVMS on Itanium.  I’ve
also worked with the HP NonStop platform and was directly involved with the
compilers for its upcoming port to x86.
>
> OpenVMS ended up at Hewlett-Packard after Digital was sold to Compaq, and
Compaq was sold to Hewlett-Packard.  HP transitioned OpenVMS to an engineering
organization in India.  A new company called VMS Software Inc (VSI) was founded
and we’ve licensed back the OS and layered products for future enhancement.
That includes a port to the x86-64 platform. We have chosen to use the LLVM
compiler infrastructure for our port to x86.
>
> OpenVMS has a large family of compilers that we will be porting onto x86.
That includes BASIC, COBOL, Fortran, Pascal, C, BLISS (one of the OpenVMS
implementation languages), and Macro32 (a compiler that accepts VAX assembly
source code and emits object code for the appropriate target, either Alpha or
Itanium).  On Alpha and Itanium, we use our own multi-language, retargetable
backend called GEM.  Our strategy will be to write a converter between the GEM
IL and the LLVM IL.  We will first be hosting the x86-target compilers as
cross-compilers running on OpenVMS Itanium to bootstrap the OS and eventually
the compilers themselves onto a future OpenVMS x86 platform. I suspect we will
be contributing several interesting enhancements as we go along. We also intend
to provide clang as well for our C++ offering.
>
> I’ve been reading as much as I can and doing lots of preliminary design and
prototyping.  I’ve been very impressed with the online documentation (only found
one broken link so far) and the infrastructure in general.
>
> I might be asking lots of simple questions, but I hope everybody can put up
with me. J
>
> I also plan on submitting a paper for this fall’s developer’s conference.
>
> Please feel free to ask questions, etc.
>
> John Reagan
>
> John dot Reagan at vmssoftware dot com
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