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Comment by millstone | Hacker News Reader

> There are numerous improvements to the PowerPC target in this release

That's interesting, who are the current PPC users contributing to LLVM? Is this all from IBM?

Highly quick-and-dirty:

  $ git log origin/release_37..origin/release_38 --no-merges -i --grep \
    'ppc\|power pc' --pretty='%ae' | grep --only-matching '@.*' | sort | \
    uniq -c | sort -rn
       16 @anl.gov
       11 @gmail.com
	7 @linux.vnet.ibm.com
	4 @iteratee.net
	3 @ca.ibm.com
	2 @hanshq.net
	2 @de.ibm.com
	2 @apple.com
	1 @samsung.com
	1 @linaro.org
	1 @imgtec.com
	1 @googlemail.com
	1 @codeaurora.org

You'd have to look at the individual addresses to disambiguate who @gmail.com and @googlemail.com are; at least 5 are from a Googler. @iteratee.net is also a Googler.

The @anl.gov is probably this: https://www.alcf.anl.gov/bgclang-compiler See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Gene#Blue_Gene.2FQ "The Blue Gene/Q Compute chip is an 18 core chip. The 64-bit PowerPC A2 processor cores are 4-way simultaneously multithreaded, and run at 1.6 GHz."

As I know, some of those contributors are just making systemic changes throughout LLVM, which would require touching the PowerPC backend.

I'm not at all surprised at the @[a-z.]+.ibm.com contributors, the @anl.gov is the code maintainer and highly visible contributor. The Argonne National Laboratory run a PowerPC based supercomputer afaik.

It seems a bit low considering IBM is funneling $1 _B_illion into Linux on POWER projects. IBM has long ties to GCC, but LLVM has captured the code generation library market even where gcc is used as the system or application compiler so it's more relevant than ever for them to put some people on it.

IBM makes a lot of announcements with price tags. Their track record says most of that money is spent on developing business applications RUNNING on Linux. Some is spent on FLOSS code contributions, but not the whole $1B.

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