MIPS Puts Out An Alternate LLVM/Clang Driver

There's been a lot of talk about LLVM/Clang this week since LLVM 3.0 is approaching and there's been numerous OpenCL announcements that depend upon LLVM/Clang as its front-end for the Open Computing Language: Portable OpenCL, libclc, and now the high-performance Saarland project. There's now another worthwhile announcement and it comes from MIPS.

MIPS Technologies, the company behind the MIPS architecture, has come up with the "Alternate Clang Driver", which is a project to create a GCC-compatible driver for Clang/LLVM. Users of this architecture common to embedded systems are often using cross-compilers, but MIPS Technologies felt the need for something different than what is currently provided by Clang, the C/C++ front-end to LLVM.

Reed Kotler of MIPS describes the alternate-clang-driver as behaving "enough like gcc cross drivers for us to run make files and other things meant for gcc right out of the box. We have for example run dejagnu gcc using it with no problems."

Like the other recent LLVM announcements, the alternate-clang-driver is still under active development. "It's still in development but it works very well for us right now." Interestingly, this driver is written in Python. The developers also welcome developers to extend it for more platforms beyond MIPS.

The alternate-clang-driver announcement was made on the LLVM development list. The source-code, which is under a BSD license, is available on Google Code.