LLVM Weekly - #9, Mar 3rd 2014

Welcome to the ninth 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.

As well as growing another year older last week, I've also started publicising the book I authored with Ben Everard, Learning Python with Raspberry Pi (Amazon US) which should ship soon in paperback or is available right now for Kindle. Hopefully it should be available soon in DRM-free digital formats on oreilly.com. I will be putting more of my Raspberry Pi exploits and tutorials on muxup.com, so if that interests you follow @muxup.

News and articles from around the web

The list of mentoring organisations for Google Summer of Code 2014 has been released. LLVM is one of them, so any budding compiler engineers who qualify may want to check out the ideas page. Other organisations I spotted advertising relevant project ideas are the Linux Foundation, X.org and of course GCC.

At the end of last week, Broadcom made a major step forward in announcing the release of full register level documentation for the VideoCore IV graphics engine as well as full graphics driver source. The device most well-known for featuring VideoCore IV is the Raspberry Pi. The released documentation opens the door to producing something similar to the GPU-accelerated FFT library support that was recently released. Some readers of LLVM Weekly may of course be interested in using this information to produce an LLVM backend. Hopefully the following pointers will help. There are lots of resources linked to at the homepage of the VideoCore IV reverse engineering project. I'd draw particular attention to the QPU reverse engineering effort which contains good information despite the reverse engineering part of the work being made unnecessary by the Broadcom release. You may want to check out the raspi-internals mailing list and #raspberrypi-internals on Freenode. It's also worth looking at the commented disassembly of the VideoCore FFT code and Herman Hermitage's work in progress QPU tutorial.

Code for Fracture, an architecture-independent decompiler to LLVM IR has been released.

Olivier Goffart has written about his proof of concept reimplementation of Qt's moc using libclang. It's actually from last year, but it's new to me.

Alex Denisov has written a guide to writing a clang plugin. He gives an example of a minimal plugin that complains about lowercased Objective C class names.

Coursera are re-running their compilers course on March the 17th. See Dirkjan Ochtman's impressions of the course from the previous run.

The Qualcomm LLVM team are advertising for an intern.

On the mailing lists

LLVM commits

Clang commits

Other project commits

Subscribe at LLVMWeekly.org.