People are correct I didn't explain my position.

LLVM: Pretty much everyone who has created a programming language with it has complained about its design. gingerbill, Jon Blow, and Andrew Kelley have all complained about it. LLVM is a good idea, but it that idea was executed better by Ken Thompson with his C compiler for Plan 9, and then again with his Go compiler design. Ken decided to create his own "architecture agnostic" assembly, which is very similar to the IR idea with LLVM.

Swift: I was very excited with the first release of Swift. But it ultimately did not have a very focused vision outlined for it. Because of this, it has morphed into a mess. It tries to be everything for everyone, like C++, and winds up being mediocre, and slow to compile to top it off.

Mojo isn't doesn't exist for the public yet. I hope it turns out to be awesome, but I'm just not going to get my hopes up this time.

▲ levodelellis 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yes. I also written a compiler and I also complained about LLVM.

LLVM is

  - Slow to compile
  - Breaks compilers/doesn't have a stable ABI
  - Optimizes poorly (at least, worse than GCC)

Swift I never used but I tried compiling it once and it was the bottom 2 slowest compiler I ever tested. The only thing nearly as bad was kotlin but 1) I don't actually remember which of these are worse 2) Kotlin wasn't meant to be a CLI compiler, it was meant to compile in the background as a language server so it was designed around that

Mojo... I have things I could say... But I'll stick to this. I talked to engineers there and I asked one how they expected any python developers to use the planned borrow checker. The engineer said "Don't worry about it" ie they didn't have a plan. The nicest thing I can say is they didn't bullshit me 100% of the time when I directly asked a question privately. That's the only nice or neutral thing I could say

▲ jervant 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

How many languages are using LLVM as its backend vs Go's?

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pbohun 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

As far as I know, only Go uses Go's back end because it was specifically designed for Go. But the architecture is such that it makes it trivial for Go to cross compile for any OS and architecture. This is something that LLVM cannot do. You have to compile a new compiler for every OS and arch combo you wish to compile to.

You could imagine creating a modified Go assembler that is more generic and not tied to Go's ABI that could accomplish the same effect as LLVM. However, it'd probably be better to create a project like that from scratch, because most of Go's optimizations happen before reaching the assembler stage.

It would probably be best to have the intermediate language that QBE has and transform that into "intermediate assembly" (IA) very similar to Go's assembly. That way the IL stage could contain nearly all the optimization passes, and the IA stage would focus on code generation that would translate to any OS/arch combo.

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nicoburns 6 hours ago | parent [-]

> As far as I know, only Go uses Go's back end because it was specifically designed for Go. But the architecture is such that it makes it trivial for Go to cross compile for any OS and architecture. This is something that LLVM cannot do. You have to compile a new compiler for every OS and arch combo you wish to compile to.

I don't think that's true. Zig have a cross-compiler (that also compiles C and C++) based on LLVM. I believe LLVM (unlike gcc) is inherently a cross-compiler, and it's mostly just shipping header files for every platform that `zig cc` is adding.

	▲	LeFantome 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I do not have enough knowledge to say anything bad about LLVM. As an "amateur" compiler writer, it did confuse me a bit though. What I will say is that it seem popular to start with LLVM and then move away from it. Zig is doign that. Rust is heading in the direction perhaps with Cranelift. It feels that, if LLVM had completely nailed its mission, these kinds of projects would be less common. It is also notable that the Dragonegg project to bring GCC languages to LLVM died but we have multiple projects porting Rust to GCC.

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hu3 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Go never advertised, designed for, nor supported external usage of their backend.

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6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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