An Early Port Of GCC To AMD's GCN Architecture

[phoronix]

Phoronix: An Early Port Of GCC To AMD's GCN Architecture

While still in its early stages, there's a port in the works of the GNU Compiler Collection for AMD's GCN (Graphics Core Next) instruction set architecture...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GCC-For-AMD-GCN-Early

[Ansla]

The title and article make it sound like they are porting gcc itself to GCN, to do the compiling on the graphics card, but it's just about generating code for the GCN architecture without the AMD proprietary finalizer.

[Michael]

The title and article make it sound like they are porting gcc itself to GCN, to do the compiling on the graphics card, but it's just about generating code for the GCN architecture without the AMD proprietary finalizer.

Added a clarification to the article if people interpret it that way.

[cj.wijtmans]

why they didnt they do llvm?

[eydee]

When can we expect Hello World benchmarks?

[melkyades]

I guess title should read "An Early Backend Of GCC for AMD's GCN Architecture"

[Michael]

I guess title should read "An Early Backend Of GCC for AMD's GCN Architecture"

For reference, Honza's Cauldron talk was titled "Porting GCC to AMD GCN"

[starshipeleven]

I suppose because everyone knows GCC is better than LLVM.

fixed.

[fuzz]

It's what we've been waiting for.

[mmstick]

I think, as far C/C++ is concerned, Clang is basically on par with GCC. And that's the problem: because Clang and GCC are equivalent there is little incentive to use Clang. It even seems that Clang's advantage in terms of faster C++ compilation is slowly going away.

As far as implementing a new backend is concerned, internals of LLVM are somewhat different from the internals of GCC.

A significant improvement that LLVM-based compilers have over GCC is compiler plugins. Rust has been benefiting greatly from compiler plugins as you may see with projects like Clippy. C/C++ software could highly benefit from similar projects to drastically improve the quality of C/C++ codebases by providing a large number of high level lints that are performed during compilation that not only would prevent bugs at compile-time that otherwise would not be caught, but would improve grammar.