Greedy Register Allocation in LLVM 3.0 | Hacker News Reader

Greedy Register Allocation in LLVM 3.0

blog.llvm.org

155 pointsdaniel022169 comments

I love reading about LLVM internals. It's exciting to see LLVM still making major algorithmic improvements to something as important as register allocation- it's a really nicely designed library both to use and to work on, and bringing the generated code's performance closer to compilers like GCC makes it even better.

I thought it had already largely surpassed GCC?

It may have largely surpassed GCC in terms of how easy it is to integrate and compilation speed, but in quality of generated code it is lagging.

Does anyone know what software was used, to make those two allocator flowcharts, in the above blog entry?

My money's on powerpoint 2007 or later. Could also be visio.

I mocked up the first figure in PPT 2007 in about 5 minutes: http://mattj.me/llvm_ra_copycat.pptx http://mattj.me/llvm_ra_copycat.png http://mattj.me/llvm_ra_copycat.pdf

The default font, drop shadow, and line spacing are not exactly the same (suggesting that these figs may have been created using e.g. Omnigraffle), but it's easy to make something that looks pretty similar.

Not trying to be a shill here, I just think Powerpoint (07 and onwards) is underrated as a figure creation tool. I use it for all my academic papers, and have found it much less painful than Visio, Dia, xfig, and others with nice-looking vector (PDF) output. I don't know if there's a way to make Powerpoint do this out of the box, but I always throw figures through pdfcrop [1], then include them directly into my (pdf)latex source.

[1] http://pdfcrop.sourceforge.net/

Thanks! I didn't know about PDFCrop. Now I can wrestle those ridiculous margins out of academic papers.

It looks like Omnigraffle, which runs on OS X. Given that llvm is mostly sponsored by Apple, I could imagine a lot of the devs are running OS X. I used a bit back in college and I remember the shadowed boxes looking like that. I especially liked it because it generates vector graphics for inclusion in LaTeX documents.

Thank you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com