LLVM Weekly - #428, March 14th 2022
Welcome to the four hundred and twenty-eighth 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 http://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
The call for proposals for EuroLLVM 2022 is out. EuroLLVM will take place between May 10-12th in the London, UK area (precise dates and location to be confirmed soon). Due to the tight timeline, rolling reviews will be conducted during the submission period (deadline April 1st).
The March Women in Compilers and Tools meetup has been announced and will feature Theresa Foley delivering a talk on “Taking the Slang Shading Language From Research to Production.”
Carlo Piovesan blogged about PartialExecutor: reducing WebAssembly size by exploring all executions in LLVM. The post was also disucssed on LLVM’s Discourse.
On the forums
Chris B shared an RFC on adding HLSL and DirectX support to Clang and LLVM. A number of the responses focused on SPIR-V code generation.
William Moses proposed Polygeist as an LLVM incubator project. Polygeist provides lowering from the Clang AST to MLIR dialects as well as transformation passes to detect high level structure within existing code. Respondents are so far generally positive about Polygeist becoming an incubator project, though questions about whether a different approach may be used for upstream Clang/MLIR support.
‘dpotop’ asked about the relationship between SSA and MLIR.
LLVM 14.0.0-rc4 was tagged.
Tom Stellard posted an RFC on using a GitHub project to manage releases.
Stella Laurenzo shared version 2 of a proposal to introduce an ml_program MLIR dialect.
Tanya Lattner initiated a discussion about restarting the Bay Area LLVM meetup.
Following discussion on the RFC thread, the C++ pseudo-parser will now move to clang-tools-extra.
Tanya Lattner started an introductions thread for women in the LLVM community.
River Riddle posted a PSA on moving FuncUp from MLIR’s BuiltinDialect to the FuncDialect.
LLVM commits
The instructions for requesting backports to release branches were updated. 9cb0605.
An optimisation to reduce redundant TLS address calculations was added. c310143.
VectorBuilder was introduced, wrapping IRBuilder to provide an interface to emit vector predication (VP) intrinsics as if they were regular instructions. 5f62156.
Tail call support was added to the 32-bit Sparc backend. 1c235c3.
Initial AsmParser and Disassembler support was added to the LoongArch backend. 3347f77, 7898587.
Clang commits
A README was added for the Clang pseudo-parser. 68b4e2d.
A new analysis was added that detects unsafe access to optionals. af98b0a.