2018 LLVM Developers' Meeting Videos Now Online

[phoronix]

Phoronix: 2018 LLVM Developers' Meeting Videos Now Online

For those wishing to learn more about the LLVM compiler stack and open-source compiler toolchains in general, the videos from October's LLVM Developers' Meeting 2018 in San Jose are now online...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=LLVM-Developer-Meeting-2018-Vid

[kpedersen]

This was interesting

I noticed that the Nintendo Switch and PS4 compiler changes have been committed into the LLVM tree. Now I understand and agree that they should use the LLVM / Clang code to improve their products but I would be interested in knowing what benefit to the LLVM project gets by accepting those changes upstream.
Surely they know that in around 5 years they will likely be removing it again because "normal humans" are unable to benefit from those compiler features without potentially breaking the law and the original companies no longer need to support those consoles any more.

Basically, how come Sony, Nintendo, etc don't maintain their own personal forks for the consumable lifespan of the hardware?

[discordian]

This was interesting

I noticed that the Nintendo Switch and PS4 compiler changes have been committed into the LLVM tree. Now I understand and agree that they should use the LLVM / Clang code to improve their products but I would be interested in knowing what benefit to the LLVM project gets by accepting those changes upstream.
Surely they know that in around 5 years they will likely be removing it again because "normal humans" are unable to benefit from those compiler features without potentially breaking the law and the original companies no longer need to support those consoles any more.

Both PPS and Switch use rather standard CPUs, what makes you think its of no use for the LLVM Project

Basically, how come Sony, Nintendo, etc don't maintain their own personal forks for the consumable lifespan of the hardware?

Cause its a hassle, particularly if you have changes that need to be rebased (and those are interesting to upstream as either they add something for a whole range of cpus, or atleast make the codebase more flexible).

[name99]

This was interesting

I noticed that the Nintendo Switch and PS4 compiler changes have been committed into the LLVM tree. Now I understand and agree that they should use the LLVM / Clang code to improve their products but I would be interested in knowing what benefit to the LLVM project gets by accepting those changes upstream.
Surely they know that in around 5 years they will likely be removing it again because "normal humans" are unable to benefit from those compiler features without potentially breaking the law and the original companies no longer need to support those consoles any more.

Basically, how come Sony, Nintendo, etc don't maintain their own personal forks for the consumable lifespan of the hardware?

What do you think is actually going on here? For example what sort of "breaking the law" do you imagine will be happening?
What happens in the real world is that Sony and Nintendo, like all companies, can make huge use of what already exists in LLVM, AND have their particular higher priority goals. So, for example, something that's very important to Sony is better debugging of optimized code. Meaning they're contributing a lot of work to make that happen. They also care about smaller code, so they're contributing to some of the more extreme -Oz work. They care about link time, so... etc etc

Here's some of what they are doing. It's not ALL LLVM work, but most of it is:

https://www.snsystems.com/technology/tech-blog/

[kpedersen]

What do you think is actually going on here? For example what sort of "breaking the law" do you imagine will be happening?

Basically, for the rest of us to benefit (or even test) this code committed to the source tree, we need to jailbreak (which is a legal gray area) our consoles.
Those with Jailbroken consoles are such a niche group, I am simply surprised that these code changes are accepted into the mainline source tree.

For example, far more people use Blackfin microcontrollers which was removed from GCC than people who have a jailbroken PS3 and yet, GCC removed blackfin support and still accepts commits for niche jailbroken platforms. Its weird that they do this.