Re: LLVM and Ada

["Dan'l Miller" <optikos@verizon.net>]

On Friday, March 23, 2018 at 12:10:21 AM UTC-5, Bojan Bozovic wrote:
> Maybe this isn't really a place for this question, but why so important thing like Fortran and Ada for LLVM
> fell on the shoulders of a single developer, why there's no involvement both from LLVM and GCC
> community?

Well, it is not exactly a single developer acting as an Ayn-Rand/Aristotlean Prime Mover lone-wolf.

https://www.llnl.gov/news/nnsa-national-labs-team-nvidia-develop-open-source-fortran-compiler-technology

  It appears that IBM & NVIDIA are stoking the fires at government research organizations that buy their exascale OpenPOWER equipment that is based on POWER ISA cores for general-purpose computing and NVIDIA GPU cores for numerical processing.

The NSF & Naval Research Office & the national labs have all been issuing grant money for various LLVM projects for some time.  For example, ALLVM's “LLVM All the Things” mantra at UIUC who originated LLVM, especially its People & Funding tab:

https://publish.illinois.edu/allvm-project

Note that official Flang (as derived from NVIDIA's PGI Fortran compiler for GPUs) views itself as separate from “community” efforts to bring Fortran to LLVM, even though those “community” efforts also use the Flang name:

https://github.com/flang-compiler/flang/issues/38

Indeed, all the implied smearing of GCC's Fortran (e.g., Flang will be the first “fully open-source” Fortran compiler; gee, I think Richard Stallman might want to say a few words about that) seems a tad disingenuous.  What really seems to be going on with Flang is that major Fortran userbases associated with the federal government think that evolving a GPU-centric Fortran compiler at NVIDIA to generate code for general-purpose-processor ISAs and be then ported to all OSes is easier than adding immense GPU support to GCC's Fortran & GCC backend.  And IBM & NVIDIA seek hardware revenue by selling exascale supercomputers to those userbases.  And then NSF & Naval Research Office grant money starts being emitted to suddenly create a funded NVIDIA-PGI-based Flang community that eclipses other Flang-on-LLVM communities.

If only Ada today had such a pull & push marketing scheme to create its own river of moneyflow!