Save the date for the 2012 LLVM Developers’ Meeting

The sixth annual bay area LLVM Developers’ Meeting will be held on November 7th and 8th at the Fairmont
Hotel in San Jose, CA.

http://www.llvm.org/devmtg/2012-11/index.html

As with previous meetings, this gathering serves as a forum for both developers and users of LLVM to meet,
learn how LLVM is used, and to exchange ideas about LLVM and its potential applications.

This 1.5 day event will include a half day hacking session and social on November 7th, followed by a full day
program including talks, birds of feather sessions, posters and dinner on November 8th.

New this year will be a $25 registration fee which will help support the event. If you need financial
assistance for this fee, please contact Tanya Lattner (llvm-devmtg <at> nondot.org). Registration is
capped at 250 attendees. Unlike previous years, the dinner will not have a lower cap and all are invited to
attend. Registration will open on May 22nd.

A huge thank you to our sponsors: Apple, Qualcomm Innovation Center (QuIC) and Google!  However, we are
still looking for more sponsors to cover the cost of speakers and students needing travel assistance. If
your company is interested, please send email to llvm-devmtg <at> nondot.org.  

To stay informed of updates concerning the meeting, please subscribe to the llvm- devmeeting mailing list:

http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/mailman/listinfo/llvm-devmeeting 

About LLVM 

The LLVM umbrella project is a collection of modular and reusable compiler and toolchain technologies,
including parsing technology, optimizers, code generators, assemblers, runtime libraries, a
debugger, and much more. All of these are distinguished by their modern and modular library-based
designs, which has led to LLVM being broadly adopted both by industry and in academia. For more

LLVM 3.0 Release!

Hello LLVM People,

Welcome to LLVM 3.0! Get it here: http://llvm.org/releases/
or read about it: http://llvm.org/releases/3.0/docs/ReleaseNotes.html

This release represents approximately 6 months of development over 
LLVM 2.9, and delivers a large number of improvements.  Some of the
bigger leaps include a new register allocator (which can provide
substantial performance improvements in generated code), full support
for atomic operations and the new C++ memory model, major improvement
in the MIPS backend, and support for gprof/gcov style of profiling
information.  In addition to these enhancements, there are countless
smaller improvements - please see the release notes for more
information and details.

Though this release is another incremental improvement over LLVM 2.9,
the "3.0" number gives us the excuse to drop some old baggage.  As
such, LLVM 3.0 no longer includes support for the llvm-gcc frontend
(please use Clang or Dragonegg instead) and does not read LLVM .bc or
.ll files from LLVM 2.8 or earlier.  Our goal is for *all* future
releases of LLVM to be able to read LLVM 3.0 files, making it a
stable file format.

Speaking of Clang, Clang 3.0 has also made numerous big leaps in this
release: many new C'1x and C++'11 (aka C++'0x) features are
implemented and it supports the Objective-C 'Automatic Reference
Counting' system.  Clang generates faster code, compiles faster, and
produces even better error and warning messages than LLVM 2.9.
Clang also includes its own release notes for this release with many
more details:

2011 LLVM Developers' Meeting Announcement & Call for Speakers!

LLVM 2.9 Release!

Hi LLVM Friends, Fans, Followers and Fanatics,

LLVM 2.9 is out, get it while it is fresh and steaming!
http://llvm.org/releases/ and read about it here:
http://llvm.org/releases/2.9/docs/ReleaseNotes.html

This release includes 6 months of development that provide major
enhancements and new features over the LLVM 2.8 release.  LLVM 2.9
includes much better optimization and code generation than LLVM 2.8
(particularly for modern ARM targets), improved support for C++'0x in
Clang, and a much more mature LLDB (see http://lldb.llvm.org/).

The LLVM 2.9 release notes cover the new features in LLVM in depth.
Some of the major features include integrated assembler support for ELF
targets (allowing direct object file writing), substantial improvements
for Link Time Optimization (LTO) which make it build faster and able to
compile large apps like Firefox 4, automatic recognition of memset and
memcpy loops, debugging optimized code improvements, infrastructure for
region based optimizations, better use of condition code registers, and
progress on a major register allocator rewrite.

One particularly notable aspect of this release is that it is the last
of the 2.x series.  One planned change in 3.0 is that we plan to drop
the llvm-gcc 4.2 compiler.  The Clang project provides a better solution
for C based languages and the DragonEgg project provides a good solution
for people interested in integrating LLVM with mainline GCC.

This release would not be possible without our volunteer release team.
Thanks to our release manager Bill Wendling, as well as Duncan Sands,
Anton Korobeynikov, Dimitry Andric, and NAKAMURA Takumi for their work
to qualify and shepherd the release.  If you have questions or comments
about this release, please contact the LLVMdev mailing list!  Onward to
LLVM 3.0!

-Chris

LLVM Release Announcement Linked List:
http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/llvm-announce/2010-October/000036.html

LLVM 2.8 Release!

Hi LLVM Friends, Fans, Followers and Fanatics,

LLVM 2.8 is live! You can download it here:
http://llvm.org/releases/ and read about it here:
http://llvm.org/releases/2.8/docs/ReleaseNotes.html

This release includes approximately 6 months of development that provide
major enhancements and new features over the LLVM 2.7 release.  LLVM 2.8
includes broad improvements in the core LLVM project and notably
includes major improvements to Clang C++ support (which is now feature
complete and quite usable).  In addition (and though they are not
included as part of the 2.8 release) two major new subprojects have
joined the LLVM project: libc++ and LLDB.

libc++ is a brand new implementation of the C++ standard library,
designed from the ground up for high performance and to support C++'0x
(when the standard is finalized).  While primarily aimed to work with
Clang++, libc++ is designed to be portable to other compilers as well.
Please see: http://libcxx.llvm.org/ for more information.

LLDB is a brand new modular debugger infrastructure which heavily builds
on libraries from LLVM and Clang (such as the Clang parser, the LLVM
disassemblers, the JIT compiler, etc).  In addition to being built as a
set of reusable libraries like LLVM, LLDB aims for extremely high
performance when debugging large applications as well as being highly
scriptable.  Please see: http://lldb.llvm.org/ for more information.

The new features in LLVM 2.8 are broad and covered in depth by the
release notes but here are some major additions to give a flavor for the
improvements: a drop-in system assembler (currently supports MachO
targets with ELF and COFF in development), support for writing .o files
directly from the compiler, an ARM disassembler, extensive ARM codegen
improvements, better support for debugging optimized code, much better
performance for X87 floating point, ARM tailcall support, and much much
more.

Another exciting aspect to see is the vibrant community that uses LLVM
technologies in various ways.  The release notes list 14 external
projects that have already updated to work with LLVM 2.8, giving a
sampling of the diversity and breadth of the community.  If you are
interested in discussing LLVM, a good forum is the annual LLVM Developer
Meeting and this years meeting is scheduled for November 4th.  If you're
interested in attending, please sign up for the mailing list:
http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/mailman/listinfo/llvm-devmeeting

This release would not be possible without our volunteer release team.
Thanks to Bill Wendling, Pawel Worach, Nick Lewycky, Duncan Sands,
Anton Korobeynikov, Edwin Török, Douglas do Couto Teixeira, and Tanya
Lattner for their work to qualify and shepherd the release.  If you
have questions or comments about this release, please contact the LLVMdev
mailing list!  Onward to 2.9!

-Chris

LLVM 2.7 Release Announcement:
http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/llvm-announce/2010-April/000034.html

2010 LLVM Developers' Meeting Announcement & Call for Speakers!

LLVM 2.7 Release!

Hi LLVM Friends, Fans, Followers and Fanatics,

LLVM 2.7 is live! You can download it here:
http://llvm.org/releases/   and read about it here:
http://llvm.org/releases/2.7/docs/ReleaseNotes.html

This release includes approximately 6 months of development that provide
major enhancements and new features over the LLVM 2.6 release.  This
includes significantly better generated code, improvements to debug
information generation and a broad number of new features in the
core infrastructure.  One exciting feature is that Clang is now able to
bootstrap itself, a major milestone in any compiler's development and
particularly notable considering the complexity of implementing C++!

The new features in LLVM 2.7 are broad and covered in the release notes
but here are some major additions to give a flavor for the improvements:
2.7 includes a new MicroBlaze target, a native code disassembler API
(with X86 supported so far), a much more memory efficient and flexible
representation of debug information, an extensible metadata system that
allows front ends to markup IR with information for language-specific
optimizations (e.g. devirtualization, type based alias analysis, etc)
and other down-stream consumers, direct IR support for taking the
address of a block and jumping to it (which speeds up some interpreters
loops by over 20%!), major progress on the MC project (a new LLVM
native code assembler), and major progress on C++ support in Clang.

Beyond the big features, there are dozens smaller features in LLVM 2.7,
such as support for non-temporal stores, 16-bit half-float support,
much improved X86 tail calls, better inliner heuristics, an improved
implementation of __builtin_object_size, many optimizer improvements,
much nicer comments produced in -fverbose-asm mode, debug info support
in the JIT, substantial footprint reductions for the LLVM compiler
itself (useful for clients of the JIT), full NEON support in the ARM
backend, support for building LLVM as a single big dynamic library,
and more.  Please see the release notes for more details.

Beyond improvements to the code, there are lots of other improvements
in the LLVM world.  We have a new logo: http://llvm.org/Logo.html
(rawr!), a new official LLVM blog: http://blog.llvm.org/ , a much
faster llvm.org server, and the LLVM repository passed 100,000
revisions in March.  Pace of development on LLVM itself and application
of LLVM to other projects continues to increase and expand.

This release would not be possible without our volunteer release team.
Thanks to Tanya Lattner, Pawel Worach, Nick Lewycky, Duncan Sands,
Anton Korobeynikov, and Edwin Torok for their work to qualify and
shepherd the release.  If you have questions or comments about this
release, please contact the LLVMdev mailing list!  Onward to 2.8,

-Chris

LLVM 2.6 Release Announcement:
http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/llvm-announce/2009-October/000033.html

LLVM 2.6 Release!

Hi LLVM Friends, Fans, Followers and Fanatics,

LLVM 2.6 is live! You can download it here:
http://llvm.org/releases/  and read about it here:
http://llvm.org/releases/2.6/docs/ReleaseNotes.html

This release includes approximately 6 months of development that provide
major enhancements and new features over the LLVM 2.5 release.  This
includes significantly better X86-64 code generation, link-time
optimization support for ELF systems (with 'gold' linker), new code
generators for the MSP430, SystemZ, and BlackFin architectures, support
for multithreaded code generation and optimization, OProfile integration
for the JIT, support for SSE 4.2, ARM V7 support (including Thumb2 and
NEON), Ada2005 bindings, many improved optimizations, bug fixes, and
extensions and enhancements to the runtime API.  Please see the release
notes for more details.

A major highlight of the LLVM 2.6 release is the first public release of
the Clang compiler (http://clang.llvm.org), which is now considered to
be production quality for C and Objective-C code on X86 targets.  Clang
produces much better error and warning messages than GCC
(http://clang.llvm.org/diagnostics.html) and can compile Objective-C
code 3x faster than GCC 4.2 (http://clang.llvm.org/performance.html),
among other major features.

In addition to Clang, the LLVM project has grown a number of new LLVM
sub-projects, including:
- compiler-rt: Compiler runtime library (http://compiler-rt.llvm.org/)
- KLEE: Symbolic Analysis & Test Case Generator (http://klee.llvm.org/)
- DragonEgg: "llvm-gcc" plugin for GCC 4.5 (http://dragonegg.llvm.org/)

This release also includes the early start of a new "llvm-mc" project
(http://llvm.org/releases/2.6/docs/ReleaseNotes.html#mc), which aims to
auto-generate a suite of assembler, disassembler, and other machine code
technology from the LLVM target descriptions.

One of the things I'm really excited to see is the number of external
projects that are applying LLVM technology in interesting new ways.  The
release notes lists two Ruby implementations (Rubinius and MacRuby), the
Pure language, the LLVM D Compiler, the Roadsend PHP compiler, Unladen
Swallow (Python) and LLVM-Lua.  These projects show an amazing breadth
of different languages adopting LLVM as their shared optimization,
code generation, and JIT technologies (depending on the project).

Besides open source projects, there are a number of commercial
organizations applying LLVM in innovative new ways
(http://llvm.org/Users.html), and LLVM is being used for a wide range
of research projects published at the top academic conferences and
journals (http://llvm.org/pubs/).  It is truly exciting to see what
people are doing with LLVM!

Finally, we just wrapped up the third annual LLVM Developer's Meeting,
which was a great opportunity for LLVM people to meet face-to-face and
exchange ideas.  The event web site (http://llvm.org/devmtg/2009-10/)
includes slides and videos for most of the talks.  We send many thanks
out to Apple, Google, Adobe and Qualcomm Incorporated for sponsoring
the event!

This release would not be possible without our volunteer release team.
Thanks to Tanya Lattner, Pawel Worach, and Nick Lewycky for their work
to qualify and shepherd the release.  If you have questions or comments
about this release, please contact the LLVMdev mailing list!

-Chris

LLVM 2.5 Release Announcement:

http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/llvm-announce/2009-March/000031.html

announcement: Third Annual LLVM Developers' Meeting

_______________________________________________
LLVM Developers mailing list
LLVMdev <at> cs.uiuc.edu         http://llvm.cs.uiuc.edu
http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/mailman/listinfo/llvmdev

LLVM 2.5 Release!

Hi Everyone,

LLVM 2.5 is live: you can download it here:
http://llvm.org/releases/ and read about it here:
http://llvm.org/releases/2.5/docs/ReleaseNotes.html

LLVM 2.5 includes an amazing collection of bug fixes, performance  
improvements (both in the compiler itself and in the generated code)  
and new features.  Some highlights include a new XCore backend,  
significantly improved llvm-gcc GFortran support, code generator  
support for arbitrary sized integers (e.g. i71), support for acting on  
overflow of integer operations, an amazing new "Writing an LLVM  
Compiler Backend" document, and many many other things.  Please read  
the release notes for details.

In addition to this release, there are a number of exciting projects  
that work with and build upon the LLVM 2.5 foundation, but are not  
included as an official part of the release.  These include the new  
Clang C/ObjC front-end, the VMKit Java VM and .NET VM, the Pure  
functional programming language, the "LDC" LLVM D Compiler, Roadsend  
PHP compiler, and many others.  Short status updates for these  
projects are included in the LLVM 2.5 release notes, and there are  
plenty of other projects using LLVM.

If you have questions or comments about this release, please contact  
the LLVMdev mailing list!

-Chris

LLVM 2.4 Release Announcement:
http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/llvm-announce/2008-November/000030.html

LLVM 2.4 Release!

Hi Everyone,

LLVM 2.4 is now officially released!  You can download it from
http://llvm.org/releases/ or view the release notes here:
http://llvm.org/releases/2.4/docs/ReleaseNotes.html

LLVM 2.4 includes many bug fixes, much faster compile times at -O0, 
substantially better code generation in various cases, a new PIC16 target, 
new IR features, and numerous other improvements and features (see the 
release notes for details).

In addition to a great release, in August we had the 2nd annual LLVM 
Developer's Meeting, with about 120 attendees.  From this meeting, we had 
a number of great presentations and in person discussions.  If you missed 
it, slides and videos of the talks are available here: 
http://llvm.org/devmtg/2008-08/

If you have any questions or comments about this release, please contact
the LLVMdev mailing list (llvmdev at cs.uiuc.edu)!

-Chris

Previous Announcement (LLVM 2.3):
http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/llvm-announce/2008-June/000027.html