http://www.osnews.com/story/15530/LLVM_at_Apple_the_OpenGL_Stack Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2009, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Tue, 10 Nov 2009 04:46:41 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif http://www.osnews.com http://osnews.com/thread?153485 http://osnews.com/thread?153485 In other news, we just had a new release, get it here:

http://llvm.org/releases/

http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/llvm-announce/2006-August/000019...
http://llvm.org/releases/1.8/docs/ReleaseNotes.html

-Chris Fri, 18 Aug 2006 06:14:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Chris Lattner) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?153488 http://osnews.com/thread?153488 This is probably good only for intel integrated graphics (and software renderer). I think, other cards from ATI and NVIDIA have TCL or vertex shaders and will not use this. Fri, 18 Aug 2006 06:22:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (pzad) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?153491 http://osnews.com/thread?153491 When will Mac OSX itself be compiled with LLVM? It sure sounds like a better solution than fat binaries and GCC or ICC. The thing LLVM needs before being useful on OSX though, is support for Objective-C.

Is there any systems out there using LLVM instead of GCC? Like some odd Linux distribution or something? Fri, 18 Aug 2006 06:27:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (John.Gustafsson) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?153494 http://osnews.com/thread?153494 Both the Mac Mini and MacBook use iNTELS own GFX chips, and they will do that for quite some time I'm guessing. iNTEL will keep on releaseing integated graphics which will be perfect (cost wise) to put in the low-end macs and "fixing" the software so the graphics runs faster on these machines will be a god send for Apple.

Besides, maybe this is just the first step when it comes to LLVM, maybe it will improve other things down the line. Heck, it could improve even more things with Leopard that we don't know of. Fri, 18 Aug 2006 06:30:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (John.Gustafsson) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?153502 http://osnews.com/thread?153502 LLVM 1.8 already supports Objective C. It does not currently include the ObjC 2.0 features though. Fri, 18 Aug 2006 06:53:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Chris Lattner) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?153525 http://osnews.com/thread?153525 Just wondering about LLVM and compiling an operating system like FreeBSD using it; does it work? does it yield 'nicer' code that performs better? OpenSolaris is gradually being ported so that the GNU GCC can compile it, has anyone tried compiling it with LLVM/GCC$? Fri, 18 Aug 2006 08:57:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (kaiwai) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?153538 http://osnews.com/thread?153538 Being curious after the announcement I looked at their mailing list and saw that Apple will also submit the x86-64 target to LLVM.

Interesting..

That said I agree with pzad: the usage of LLVM by Apple for OpenGL seems mostly useful for laptops with lowend graphic boards.
It would be interesting to see performance figures.. Fri, 18 Aug 2006 09:37:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (renox) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?153546 http://osnews.com/thread?153546 That said I agree with pzad: the usage of LLVM by Apple for OpenGL seems mostly useful for laptops with lowend graphic boards. It would be interesting to see performance figures.

Actually, the announcement email that was linked indicates that this will be used sometimes even with high-end graphics cards when advanced capabilities are used:

LLVM is currently used when hardware support is disabled or when the current hardware does not support a feature requested by the user app. This happens most often on low-end graphics chips (e.g. integrated graphics), but can happen even with the high-end graphics when advanced capabilities are used. Fri, 18 Aug 2006 10:13:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (binarycrusader) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?153552 http://osnews.com/thread?153552 > It sure sounds like [LLVM is] a better solution than fat binaries and GCC or ICC.

LLVM a better solution?
More eleguant ok, but what is best is whichever has the best runtime performance, which means in that order ICC > GCC > LLVM and which suits your need, no ObjectiveC on ICC so GCC > LLVM.

Now apparently Apple is set on LLVM so they will probably work on improving its performance: it's not because OpenGL on LLVM is faster than regular OpenGL (they handmade many parts) that generic code is faster on LLVM than GCC (currently I think it is quite the opposite.). Fri, 18 Aug 2006 10:31:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (renox) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?153590 http://osnews.com/thread?153590 You, sir, have that completely out of order.

LLVM is an aggressively-optimizing compiler that rivals GCC for speed in almost everything, and crushes it in situations where its most advanced features (LTO and inter-procedural optimization) come into play. There's a reason that GCC was considering incorporating LLVM's optimization framework rather than continuing to extend their own. ;-)

For comparison, look at the detailed build results on http://llvm.org/nightlytest/ , particularly at the GCC/LLVM column. That's the ratio of execution time of the test compiled w/ GCC vs. compiled w/ LLVM. Notice how the majority are .9 or greater, and a significant number are >1? Fri, 18 Aug 2006 13:30:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (resistor) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?153603 http://osnews.com/thread?153603 Thanks for the information, I'm glad to be incorrect.

Could you give me the proper URL for the benchmarks?
I couldn't find the graph you're talking about on the URL you provided, I tried to click around but frankly this website is a mess.

On the comment page of the annonce http://arstechnica.com/staff/fatbits.ars/2006/8/17/5024 percivall says that a python compiled with LLVM is twice as slow as a python compiled with GCC, so either he made a mistake or there are still some problem for LLVM.. Fri, 18 Aug 2006 14:11:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (renox) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?153652 http://osnews.com/thread?153652 That's great news. It wasn't too terribly obvious from looking at the webpage on the other hand, so I hope you forgive me:)

Is ObjC experimental or a full blown version that I could compile with from XCode and expect to work just as well as gcc? Fri, 18 Aug 2006 15:46:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (John.Gustafsson) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?153674 http://osnews.com/thread?153674 > On the comment page of the annonce http://arstechnica.com/staff/
> fatbits.ars/2006/8/17/5024 percivall says that a python compiled
> with LLVM is twice as slow as a python compiled with GCC, so either
> he made a mistake or there are still some problem for LLVM..

It's hard to know what's going on without more details. LLVM currently has two GCC-based front-ends (one based on 3.4, one based on 4). The later one doesn't have optimizations hooked up by default, which means that, by default, you get almost completely unoptimized code.

In practice this means that users who download it and try it out without reading the documentation often get really slow code and leave with a bad impression. Those who know what they are doing have no problem getting good performance out of the compiler.

This is obviously a suboptimal situation, and has resulted primarily because we have been focusing on other short-term priorities. I expect that LLVM 1.9 will have good performance "out of the box", along with other new features (e.g. x86-64 support).

-Chris Fri, 18 Aug 2006 16:57:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Chris Lattner) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?153676 http://osnews.com/thread?153676 Chris,
I don't know if you know what exactly Apple is doing with OpenGL & LLVM, but from what I have read, it sounds like, besides optimizing the GL branch code run-time (which sounds really directly applicable to alot of general OS code), they are also optimizing the shader programs themselves that are sent to the GPU... ???

are you familiar with any other projects (KDE, ...?) that are looking into linking with LLVM compiler?
the claimed results from Apple re: OpenGL really seem to speak loudly about what LLVM can do... Fri, 18 Aug 2006 17:10:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (mutantsushi) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?153679 http://osnews.com/thread?153679 I'm sorry, but I have no intention of saying anything about Apple's plans for LLVM other than what has already been publically announced. If you have questions about the LLVM though, I'd be happy to answer them.

I don't know of any other large projects (e.g. KDE) that are using LLVM. I do know it is used by several commercial companies for a small variety of different projects though.

-Chris Fri, 18 Aug 2006 17:26:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Chris Lattner) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?153751 http://osnews.com/thread?153751 No, they compile shaders to be executed on the CPU, when the GPU dosen't support thouse shaders. Fri, 18 Aug 2006 21:05:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (panzi) Comments