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Comment by levodelellis | Hacker News Reader

I never heard of hardware without one

Avoiding interacting with LLVM as a user doesn't mean you've created something equivalent to LLVM.

And if the C compiler you use is clang then you're still literally making use of LLVM.

IIRC, the Inmos Transputer shipped without a C compiler, and while third party products (including a port of GCC) did come later, it was Occam-only for quite some time.

I don't know what point you're trying to make but your question was what's an alternative to llvm. People writing compilers always used C89 or a version of it (C11 allows an easier atomic implementation). There's a lot more C89 compilers than backends that llvm supports. When I was writing arduino code clang/llvm couldn't generate the AVR code for the board. The default toolchain was gcc with an AVR backend. IIRC it had optimizations and was the only reasonable compiler I could use. There's nothing wrong using C as your backend

> There's nothing wrong using C as your backend

I didn't say there was. Saying use C instead of LLVM is fine for a language designer.

But that doesn't make it a replacement for LLVM as a piece of infrastructure. C compilers still need an optimizing backend like LLVM.

The conversation is about whether or not LLVM is a shit piece of engineering, not whether you should target C or IR as a language designer. Avoiding using LLVM directly isn't a replacement lol.

You could say "GCC" is a replacement which at least isn't completely false, but GCC's backend is far more annoying to use for different languages.

You don't really need to deal with gcc backend. Most languages are expressible in C89. It'll obviously be less readable since generated lines look nothing like source lines but C89 beats llvm in most cases, especially if the C compiler supports assembly. I stuck to using intrinsics only because I heard of compilers producing worse code when it hits asm blocks since it can't understand it as well as intrinsics. I took out llvm last time it broke my compiler because it didn't add any value

So what you're saying is that C source code is the (only) stable LLVM ABI ;)

Haha, yes

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