LLVM's DragonEgg 2.8 Released For GCC

Only one week has passed since the release of LLVM 2.8, but out today is version 2.8 of DragonEgg. For those out of the loop, DragonEgg is a GCC plug-in for GCC 4.5 and later that replaces the optimizers and code generations from GCC with that of those from the Low-Level Virtual Machine.

DragonEgg takes advantage of the plug-in capabilities of GCC 4.5 and later while aiming to support all of the languages supported by the GNU Compiler Collection on an unmodified GCC installation. However, those are the long-term goals and is not where DragonEgg is currently positioned. DragonEgg's C support should be spot on while the C++ support is fairly good and continuing to mature. The level of support for Fortran, ADA, Objective-C, Objective-C++, and Java all varies, but C is certainly the best supported language by this project to use LLVM as a GCC back-end.

Right now DragonEgg also requires patching GCC and is only supported on x86 and x86_64 architectures running Linux or Darwin. With all of that said, the DragonEgg developers do not yet consider this GCC plug-in as being production ready.

This release of DragonEgg 2.8 is, of course, dependent upon LLVM 2.8. Those interested in trying it out can find more on the DragonEgg page.