Re: [Libjit-developers] libjit vs LLVM

[Chris Lattner]

On Sun, 30 May 2004, Rhys Weatherley wrote:

> On Friday 28 May 2004 04:20 pm, Chris Lattner wrote:
>
> > > There's no law that says there can be only one project of this kind.  You
> > > obviously feel that you have a lead in this area.  Feel free to exploit
> > > it to my disadvantage if you'd like. :-)
> >
> > It's not that.  The problem is that there is a limited marked for this
> > kind of thing.  Open source is really bad because everyone reinvents the
> > wheel.  In the domain of word processors this is more or less okay: there
> > is a huge audience for it.  In the domain of compiler related systems the
> > domain (compiler writers/front-end developers/JIT clients) is much
> > smaller.  I just think it would be more beneficial for the community as a
> > whole if we worked together, that's all.
>
> Perhaps.  The question is: "Who gets to choose which project is the 'real'
> one?".  The proprietry world has managers and CEO's who make these decisions,
> cancelling projects that they believe have less of a chance.  And it really
> sucks to be the victim of such a cancellation (I know this from personal
> experience).

What do you mean by "real" one?  They are both real.

> We don't have anyone in the FOSS community who can act as such an
> arbiter and for good reason: destroying people's hopes and dreams is
> morally wrong, no matter what the justification. So, which one of us do
> you propose should give up and just concede the space to the other?
> Because it is going to suck to be the other guy.

Actually I was going to suggest that we work together and merge the best
features of both into a common source-base that could be used by both
groups going forward: eventually unifying the developer pool and
mind share.  This might be difficult, but I think the end result would be
useful.

> Or ... we can both work in parallel, and the community gets two decent JIT
> infrastructures to choose from, instead of only one.  Because ultimately it
> is up to users to decide what kind of JIT library they need, not us.

True, but they would have two different JIT infrastructures that are worse
off than a unified one.  :)

> How about the following:
>
>     The LLVM project (http://llvm.cs.uiuc.edu/) has some similar
>     characteristics to libjit in that its intermediate format is
>     generic across front-end languages.  It is written in C++ and provides
>     a large set of compiler development and optimization components;
>     much larger than libjit itself provides.  According to its author,
>     Chris Lattner, a subset of its capabilities can be used to build JIT's.

Sure, that's fine.  Please change the link to llvm.org though (a recent
change).  Thanks!

-Chris

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