Re: [Libjit-developers] libjit vs LLVM

[Rhys Weatherley]

On Friday 28 May 2004 04:20 pm, Chris Lattner wrote:

> > There's no law that says there can be only one project of this kind.  You
> > obviously feel that you have a lead in this area.  Feel free to exploit
> > it to my disadvantage if you'd like. :-)
>
> It's not that.  The problem is that there is a limited marked for this
> kind of thing.  Open source is really bad because everyone reinvents the
> wheel.  In the domain of word processors this is more or less okay: there
> is a huge audience for it.  In the domain of compiler related systems the
> domain (compiler writers/front-end developers/JIT clients) is much
> smaller.  I just think it would be more beneficial for the community as a
> whole if we worked together, that's all.

Perhaps.  The question is: "Who gets to choose which project is the 'real'
one?".  The proprietry world has managers and CEO's who make these decisions,
cancelling projects that they believe have less of a chance.  And it really
sucks to be the victim of such a cancellation (I know this from personal
experience).

We don't have anyone in the FOSS community who can act as such an arbiter and
for good reason: destroying people's hopes and dreams is morally wrong, no
matter what the justification.

So, which one of us do you propose should give up and just concede the space
to the other?  Because it is going to suck to be the other guy.

Or ... we can both work in parallel, and the community gets two decent JIT
infrastructures to choose from, instead of only one.  Because ultimately it
is up to users to decide what kind of JIT library they need, not us.

How about the following:

    The LLVM project (http://llvm.cs.uiuc.edu/) has some similar
    characteristics to libjit in that its intermediate format is
    generic across front-end languages.  It is written in C++ and provides
    a large set of compiler development and optimization components;
    much larger than libjit itself provides.  According to its author,
    Chris Lattner, a subset of its capabilities can be used to build JIT's.

Cheers,

Rhys.