LLVM Weekly - #43, Oct 27th 2014

Welcome to the forty-third 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.

This week it's the LLVM Developers' Meeting in San Jose. Check out the schedule. Unfortunately I won't be there, so I'm looking forward to the slides and videos going online.

News and articles from around the web

Philip Reames has written up a detailed discussion of statepoints vs gcroot for representing call safepoints. The aim is to clearly explain how the safepoint functionality provided by the patches currently up for review differ to the current gc.root support.

The Haskell community have put together a proposal for an improved LLVM backend to GHC. They intend to ship GHC with its own local LLVM build.

CoderGears have published a blog post about using Clang to get better warnings in Visual C++ projects.

There is going to be a dedicated LLVM devroom at FOSDEM 2015. Here is the call for speakers and participation.

On the mailing lists

• Elena Demikhovsky has asked for comments on a proposal to add masked vector load and store intrinsics. Essentially all feedback so far is positive on the idea.

• Renato Golin proposes moving libunwind into compiler-rt. One of the subtleties is hat libunwind isn't fully compatible with GCC's unwind implementation (due to different data structure layouts), which means they can't be mixed.

• Kristof Beyls has posted some notes in preparation for the benchmarking infrastructure BoF at the LLVM dev meeting.

LLVM commits

• The nonnull metadata has been introduced for Load instructions. r220240.

• minnum and maxnum intrinsics have been added. r220341, r220342.

• The Hexagon backend gained a basic disassembler. r220393.

• PassConfig gained usingDefaultRegAlloc to tell if the default register allocator is being used. r220321.

• An llvm-go tool has been added. It is intended to be used to build components such as the Go frontend in-tree. r220462.

Clang commits

• C compilation defaults to C11 by default, matching the behaviour of GCC 5.0. r220244.

• Clang should now be better at finding Visual Studio in non-standard setups. r220226.

• The Windows toolchain is now known as MSVCToolChain, to allow the addition a CrossWindowsToolChain which will use clang/libc++/lld. r220362, r220546.

Other project commits

• The libcxxabi gained support for running libc++abi tests with sanitizers. r220464.