llvm dev - Apr 2018 - LLVM Weekly - #222, Apr 2nd 2018

LLVM Weekly - #222, Apr 2nd 2018
===============================
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Welcome to the two hundred and twenty-second 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](https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-bradbury/). Subscribe to future
issues at <http://llvmweekly.org> and pass it on to anyone else you think
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be interested. Please send any tips or feedback to <asb at
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@llvmweekly or @asbradbury on Twitter.


## News and articles from around the web

Neil Henning has written a short post on [how to read and write LLVM
bitcode](http://www.duskborn.com/how-to-read-write-llvm-bitcode/).


## On the mailing lists

* Yaxun (Sam) Liu
[proposes](http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/cfe-dev/2018-March/057426.html)
adding a HIP language mode to Clang. HIP is a language with similarities to
CUDA.

* Michael Spencer [proposes using Markdown for LLVM
documentation](http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2018-March/122234.html).

* Hsiangkai Wang is seeking feedback on an [RFC to generate debug info for
labels in a
function](http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2018-March/122175.html).

* LLVM 5.0.2-rc2 [has been
tagged](http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2018-March/122245.html).

* Daniel Neilson has [reported
back](http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2018-March/122143.html) on
recent work to update memcpy/memmove/memset to have destination and source
alignment attributes.


## LLVM commits

* An extra InstCombine optimisation improved zlib performance by up to 10%.
[r328539](http://reviews.llvm.org/rL328539).

* The LLVM library was renamed from libLLVM-X.Y to libLLVM-X, as the minor
version is no longer used in releases.
[r328768](http://reviews.llvm.org/rL328768).

* llvm-pdbutil diff mode has been deleted.
[r328562](http://reviews.llvm.org/rL328562).

* LLVM assembly output will now use .set instead of = when printing an
assignment. [r328635](http://reviews.llvm.org/rL328635).

* Rudimentary support was added for auto-vectorisation for Hexagon's HVX.
[r328639](http://reviews.llvm.org/rL328639).



## Clang commits

* Named return value optimisation (NRVO) was generalised to cover C structs.
[r328809](http://reviews.llvm.org/rL328809).

* The Clang analyzer will now avoid modeling C++17 constructors that aren't
fully supported. [r328893](http://reviews.llvm.org/rL328893).


## Other project commits

* A new summarizeStats.py utility was added to the OpenMP repository. This
processes raw data provided by an instrumented OpenMP runtime library to
produce graphs and a CSV file. [r328568](http://reviews.llvm.org/rL328568).

* LLD gained support for MIN and MAX in linker scripts.
[r328696](http://reviews.llvm.org/rL328696).

* LLD now supports short thunks on ARM. This reduces the size of Chromium for
Android's .text section by 160KB.
[r328846](http://reviews.llvm.org/rL328846).