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Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Software Issues and Discussion => Topic started by: adrian82 on April 12, 2020, 04:38:01 PM

Title: Fundraiser to support the development of LLVM for m68k
Post by: adrian82 on April 12, 2020, 04:38:01 PM
Hello!

After a very successful fundraiser campaign on Bountysource.com to support the modernization and preservation of the m68k backend in GCC [1], we have started a new fundraiser which aims to support the development of an m68k backend for LLVM [2].

LLVM is a very powerful compiler toolchain [3] which has a strict separation between language frontends (C/C++/Fortran etc) and its backends (x86_64, arm, arm64 etc). This separation allows LLVM to be easily adopted as backends for other languages such as Rust, Julia or Swift which means that developers of LLVM frontend languages don't need to bother with backend development and can almost fully concentrate on the frontend.

Thus, adding an m68k backend to LLVM would open up the Amiga to a world of modern languages like Rust which are being adopted by more and more software projects. Getting m68k support into LLVM and consequently Rust (the latter being rather easy with just a couple of hundred lines of code) will make sure the Amiga - and any other m68k platform - won't fall behind in the world of modern software.

The goal of this campaign is to finalize the m68k LLVM backend written by Artyom Goncharov [4] who worked on the backend as a little learning project but stopped the development after the code reached a minimally usable form. There is already at least one experienced LLVM developer working on the code and I expect the first improvements for the backend to happen in the upcoming weeks.

Thanks,
Adrian

> [1] https://forum.amiga.org/index.php?topic=74313
> [2] https://www.bountysource.com/issues/90829856-llvm-complete-the-m68000-backend-so-it-can-be-merged-upstream
> [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LLVM
> [4] https://github.com/M680x0/M680x0-llvm
Title: Re: Fundraiser to support the development of LLVM for m68k
Post by: kolla on May 03, 2020, 08:01:54 PM
What happened to the bountysource page, I only get "internal server error" - did it vanish?
Title: Re: Fundraiser to support the development of LLVM for m68k
Post by: SamuraiCrow on May 03, 2020, 08:32:55 PM
It didn't show up in a search on bountysource using LLVM as a search term either.
Title: Re: Fundraiser to support the development of LLVM for m68k
Post by: adrian82 on June 24, 2020, 04:42:07 PM
Hello!

A quick update. An LLVM developer working on the code has progressed the codebase far enough now that - with some additional fixes from me - it's now possible to cross-compile simple C programs with clang for Linux/m68k.

More details here: https://lists.debian.org/debian-68k/2020/06/msg00030.html

Adrian
Title: Re: Fundraiser to support the development of LLVM for m68k
Post by: OldAmigan on July 01, 2020, 07:09:34 PM
I believe that at last years Amiwest, people dug in deep to give a bounty for this
Title: Re: Fundraiser to support the development of LLVM for m68k
Post by: nbache on July 01, 2020, 08:11:48 PM
No, that was for the GCC compiler - see the first lines of the post in this thread.

Best regards,

Niels