Sony Begins Landing PlayStation 5 Support In The Upstream LLVM/Clang Compiler

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Sony Begins Landing PlayStation 5 Support In The Upstream LLVM/Clang Compiler

Similar to Sony contributing PlayStation 4 compiler support in LLVM with Clang being their preferred code compiler, Sony has now begun upstreaming PlayStation 5 (PS5) support in the open-source LLVM/Clang compiler stack...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Sony-PS5-LLVM-Upstream-Start

[elatllat]

But LLVM can't test any of that code maybe making it hard to maintain right?

[CommunityMember]

But LLVM can't test any of that code maybe making it hard to maintain right?

The test harnesses can test what the test harnesses are built to test, and the more coverage the better. And some of the changes were to generalize the PS[n] support, making the code easier to maintain for the PS4, PS5, and the (eventual?) PS6. In practice there are many targets that the LLVM core maintainers depend on the target maintainers to test the resulting code generation on (no one has one of every possible target, and sometimes the bugs are very very target specific).

[Flaburgan]

I have trouble to understand why contributing upstream 2 years after your product launch. It seems much more efficient to do it before...

[coder]

I have trouble to understand why contributing upstream 2 years after your product launch.

The idea is that Sony wants to make their PS5 backend easier to maintain, going forward. If they upstream it, then some of this burden is shared by others making changes that would potentially break it - at least in obvious ways, such as causing it not to compile.

It seems much more efficient to do it before...

In the time leading up to launch, they were probably too busy to get their patches cleaned up for submission, as well as to go through the full review process.

Besides, if you're a PS5 game developer, you're getting the tools from Sony, as part of their SDK - not downloading and building all of them, yourself (though it's nice if you have that option). It's not comparable to the challenges AMD and Intel face in getting their hardware support upstreamed before their hardware launches, because most of their users aren't content to simply run an AMD or Intel flavor of Linux or be restricted exclusively to development tools provided directly by AMD/Intel.

I guess a final point might be that upstreaming their changes too early could give competing consoles a heads-up about special instructions Sony added. Obviously, it'd be too late for MS to respond in the directly competing launch, but maybe a mid-generation refresh would still be early enough to glean some ideas from their competitor.