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Comment by wireprotocol | Hacker News Reader

It seems like rust bundles it's own version of llvm. Are patches from the rust community making it in slowly? Or are there some fundamental differences?

Does Swift do something similar, or does it work with stock llvm?

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It's strange to say it, given that Swift's principal designer is the original creator of LLVM and given that Apple drives the majority of LLVM development, but Swift does indeed ship its own custom version of LLVM: https://github.com/apple/swift-llvm . I'm not sure if, like Rust, Swift also works on stock LLVM.

This is actually quite common. Emscripten ships its own copy of LLVM as well. Rust and Emscripten might actually be combining their efforts into a single LLVM branch this year, in order to provide better WebAssembly support for Rust.

I'm curious if you've seen any of the work in-tree that's going on for a native webassembly target in LLVM? It's still early and super rough, but it seems something you may want to peek at.

> It seems like rust bundles it's own version of llvm. Are patches from the rust community making it in slowly? Or are there some fundamental differences?

https://github.com/rust-lang/llvm/commits/rust-llvm-2016-02-...

The delta is minimal, and mostly consists in bugfixes and optimizations. All changes are typically forwarded upstream. Since long time, rustc can be built without using the embedded LLVM, and several distributions (eg. Debian) do that.

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