What to do with LLVM and Bitcode?

[timcoo...@gmail.com]

I'm a big user and fan of the gomobile tools and the cross-compiling features of Go. It's a brilliant piece of code to do cross platform mobile library development.

However with the introduction of Bitcode for iOS by Apple we are missing a big feature: Bitcode support. Of course this is not an issue in gomobile, the Go toolchains itself are missing Bitcode support.

What should be the approach to get Bitcode support in Go or a Go-based compiler?

I saw that some work is being done within Google's own public repositories in creating an front-end for LLVM for Go. I could imagine that having a LLVM front-end would also assist webassembly support.

Tim

[Than McIntosh]

Hi Tim,

Yes, we are in the process of getting a version of Go working with LLVM (I'm one of the folks working on this effort). Generating bitcode is certainly an idea that we've thought about, although there are still many other more important things we need to do first to get our compiler ready for "prime time".

Once you've actually generated LLVM IR for a Go program, it's pretty easy to spit out bitcode. The more interesting questions would be more around what sorts of rules + restrictions are imposed on the bitcode by the App Store, and exactly what gets done with it later on down the pike. 

Cheers, Than

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[Stuart Carnie]

Hi Than,

I've been watching the commits in anticipation of an announcement for a while now and wonder what goals you and the team have for go-llvm? Obviously using LLVM brings a lot of benefits to code generation.

Cheers,

Stuart

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[Ian Lance Taylor]

On Tue, Nov 7, 2017 at 8:23 AM, Stuart Carnie <stuart...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I've been watching the commits in anticipation of an announcement for a
> while now and wonder what goals you and the team have for go-llvm? Obviously
> using LLVM brings a lot of benefits to code generation.

The basic goal is to have another alternative Go compiler with
different tradeoffs, along the lines of gccgo.

Ian

[Stuart Carnie]

Sounds great. Is the team taking outside contributions and is there a list of milestones / issues we could help with?

[Wei....@arm.com]

I'm a little confused and just ask a basic question:

What's the difference between go-llvm and llgo?

Thanks

Wei Xiao

[Ian Lance Taylor]

On Mon, Mar 26, 2018 at 6:53 PM, <Wei....@arm.com> wrote:
> I'm a little confused and just ask a basic question:
> What's the difference between go-llvm and llgo?

They are two different approaches to adding a Go frontend to the LLVM
compiler. Specifically, llgo starts with the standard library
go/parse and go/types packages. GoLLVM starts with the gofrontend
code that is used with gccgo.

Ian

> On Wednesday, November 8, 2017 at 1:57:35 AM UTC+8, Ian Lance Taylor wrote:
>>
>> On Tue, Nov 7, 2017 at 8:23 AM, Stuart Carnie <stuart...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> >
>> > I've been watching the commits in anticipation of an announcement for a
>> > while now and wonder what goals you and the team have for go-llvm?
>> > Obviously
>> > using LLVM brings a lot of benefits to code generation.
>>
>> The basic goal is to have another alternative Go compiler with
>> different tradeoffs, along the lines of gccgo.
>>
>> Ian
>

[Andrew Wilkins]

On Tuesday, March 27, 2018 at 10:22:03 AM UTC+8, Ian Lance Taylor wrote:

On Mon, Mar 26, 2018 at 6:53 PM,  <Wei....@arm.com> wrote:
> I'm a little confused and just ask a basic question:
> What's the difference between go-llvm and llgo?

They are two different approaches to adding a Go frontend to the LLVM
compiler.  Specifically, llgo starts with the standard library
go/parse and go/types packages.  GoLLVM starts with the gofrontend
code that is used with gccgo.

Another significant difference is that llgo is moribund. Sadly I haven't had the time or energy for it for a long time, and it doesn't look like pcc has either.