Submitted by LLVM 2.2 has been released. Wikipedia summarises: “The Low Level Virtual Machine, generally known as LLVM, is a compiler infrastructure, written in C++, which is designed for compile-time, link-time, run-time, and ‘idle-time’ optimization of programs written in arbitrary imperative programming languages. The LLVM project started in 2000 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.”
This is a very interesting project and I’m following the development closely.
Currently it can’t compete with gcc in all cases – but the design is (imho) superior and already now are the compilation speed and the speed of the generated code better than using gcc – at least in my tests using relatively simple, inefficient (brute-force) C-code.
The way that PyPy project is using it as a backend shows a lot of promise. It could lend a new level of performance and flexibility to higher level programming languages.
http://codespeak.net/pypy/dist/pypy/doc/home.html
Edited 2008-02-13 19:22 UTC
The Kaleidoscope Tutorial used with the latest LLVM has knocked years of development time off of the Mattathias project.
http://llvm.org/docs/tutorial/
https://sourceforge.net/projects/mattathias
The Gallium3D framework is using LLVM to compile shaders for video cards, which shows how flexible and well designed it really is.