Re: Announcement: GNAT ported to LLVM

[baldrick <baldrick@free.fr>]

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.