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This infrastructure is also slow and leads to poor compilation times for any language that uses llvm as a backend. In an era of automatic code generation, this
by norir 2mo ago
This infrastructure is also slow and leads to poor compilation times for any language that uses llvm as a backend. In an era of automatic code generation, this will become more and more of a problem as llvm compilation times will become a huge bottleneck. I am very bearish on llvm as a technology and while I will acknowledge its influence, I expect that it is at or near its peak and market share will decline dramatically over the next five to ten years.
- simondotau 2mo agoIt makes perfect sense to ditch LLVM in development contexts, as its slowness is antithetical to developer productivity — most obviously in tight edit-compile-test loops. And this becomes orders of magnitude more salient when the edit-compile-test loop is being driven by AI. But even when languages are described as "moving away" that usually means building their own very fast-compiling/min-optimising x64/ARM backend for development builds, while still acknowledging the need for LLVM for highly optimised release builds.
- Archit3ch 2mo agoFor developer productivity, you can move to a REPL workflow with edit-compile-test at the function level. Julia does this while staying on LLVM. Of course, compile-the-world is still going to be slow, but there is no solution for that in the C++/Rust ecosystems either.
- mathisfun123 2mo ago> In an era of automatic code generation lol what does this even mean
- altmanaltman 2mo agoit means that was an AI-generated comment to an article which was also AI-generated. The other comment replying to this comment is also AI-written. The internet is not dead, its just fake
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- flohofwoe 2mo agoWhere are the fast alternatives though that do the same level of optimizations? LLVM might not be the fastest, but when you get to the point that build times become a problem, your code base is too big (or your frontend is doing silly things). Maybe ask your 'automatic code generation' to generate less code bloat ;)
- sirwhinesalot 2mo agoThe only alternative I'm aware of with a similar level of optimization is GCC's backend, which is just as slow. Both should be much faster at compiling debug builds than they are though. There's an LLVM fork (TPDE-LLVM) that supports a limited set of backend targets but compiles way faster (order of magnitude) for O0, but for whatever reason they haven't managed to merge it with the mainline LLVM. Even with that there's still plenty of overhead from all the horrible C++ OOP-brained abstractions LLVM uses.
- high_na_euv 2mo ago5 years? There would need to be already production ready, growing alternative
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- Terretta 2mo ago> leads to poor compilation times for any language that uses llvm as a backend it doesn't take long for user delay to sum to more than developer delay