LLVM Weekly - #295, August 26th 2019

Welcome to the two hundred and ninety-fifth 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. Subscribe to future issues at https://llvmweekly.org and pass it on to anyone else you think may be interested. Please send any tips or feedback to asb@asbradbury.org, or @llvmweekly or @asbradbury on Twitter.

News and articles from around the web

Kristóf Umann has written up a final report on his GSoC project to enhance bug reports in the Clang Static Analyzer.

On the mailing lists

• Alex Davies started a thread on using GlobalISel to provide peephole optimisations.

• Jonas Devlieghere suggested removing the unfinished ncurses UI from LLDB. So far, respondents are in favour of keeping it.

• Prashanth N. R. writes to the LLVM mailing list about FC, a new LLVM-based Fortran frontend. "The performance in SPEC becnhmarks are comparable(better in few cases) to flang and gfortran compilers in both speed and rate runs."

• Hans Wennborg has sent out a reminder to write 9.0 release notes.

• Neil Nelson shared a chart of memory usage for test-release.sh.

• Gábor Horváth gave an update on adding lifetime analysis to Clang.

• Pavel Labath shared an RFC on support for unwinding in LLDB for Windows.

• DeForest Richards kicked off a discussion on re-organizing the LLVM docs.

• Johannes Doerfert started an RFC thread on increasing the scope of Value::getPointerXXX methods.

LLVM commits

• Documentation was added for GWP-ASan, a sampled allocator aiming to help finding use-after-free and heap-buffer-overflow bugs. r369552.

• A "must-be-executed-context" explorer was committed, allowing the traversal of instructions that are guaranteed to be executed whenever instruction I is. r369765.

• -x86-experimental-vector-widening-legalization was added to allow the previous behaviour to be selectively enabled. r369332.

• Initial GlobalISel infrastructure for RISC-V was added. r369467.

Clang commits

• The StaticAnalyzer VirtualCallChecker was improved, and parts of it are now enabled by default. r369449.

• The clangd features table was updated with links to relevant LSP extension proposals. r369229.

Other project commits

• The LLVM test-suite has started to gain microbenchmarks for memory functions (e.g. memcmp, memcpy, ...). r369707.

• LLD gained further improvements to Android dynamic relocation packing. r369488.

• LLDB now supports the C++20 char8_t type. r369582.