Re: Announcement: GNAT ported to LLVM

[Gene <gene.ressler@gmail.com>]

On Mar 24, 2:09 pm, baldrick <baldr...@free.fr> wrote:
> Hi Sam,
>
> > Thanks Duncan, this is an outstanding contribution to the Ada
> > community. Given that LLVM is already ahead of GCC in terms of code
> > generation quality (sometimes, starting from zero and choosing another
> > path is a competitive advantage), this looks very promising.
>
> I'm glad you appreciate my work!  That said, in my experience gcc-4.2
> produces slightly faster code for Ada than llvm-gcc-4.2 does.  Given
> that LLVM manages to produce code that comes close to gcc while being
> much simpler than gcc and easier to improve, I expect it will overtake
> gcc soon.  In fact I haven't even started working on Ada specific
> optimizer improvements yet: I've been concentrating on correctness.
>
> > The difficult task, as you already know, will be to keep the Ada
> > front-ends in both compilers in sync. I wish you good luck with that!
>
> It's not yet clear to me whether I should backport the gcc-4.3 Ada
> front-end to llvm-gcc-4.2, or start working on llvm-gcc-4.3.  For the
> moment I'm just working on improving the correctness and robustness
> of llvm-gcc-4.2.

This is wonderful, Duncan.  I agree that this is a huge deal for Ada.
I only learned about LLVM a few months ago.  When I did, I filed and
Ada LLVM compiler in my drawer of Utopian ideas.  Thanks for making it
true!

I assume that due to the link-time optimization capability that
inlining among packages will be handled naturally.  GNAT-gcc can't do
that, right?  This alone ought to be a big deal as accessor/setter
conventions are leading to programs filled with tiny procedures and
functions.