DragonEgg Starts Cracking In LLVM

Going back to the earlier days of LLVM has been the DragonEgg plug-in. DragonEgg is a GCC plug-in that implements LLVM's optimizers and code generators within GCC. With Clang becoming suitable for day-to-day use on large production workloads and GCC also improving, the benefits of DragonEgg have greatly diminished.

With LLVM/Clang being capable of compiling most production workloads out there directly and doing a good job at it, DragonEgg isn't too useful and with GCC also making significant improvements the last few years. Over Clang and it just supporting C/C++/Objective-C, one of the appreciable goals of DragonEgg with using LLVM as a GCC back-end was the push to support all of GCC languages. Unfortunately that wasn't fully realized either with the only "extra" languages being Ada and Fortran. DragonEgg could also compile a fair amount of GCC's Go language implementation while the DragonEgg'ed Java code would compile but not execute.

DragonEgg hasn't seen a release now since LLVM 3.3 and as of yesterday DragonEgg was dropped from the release script, which probably makes seeing a new release of this GCC plug-in unlikely. Those wishing to reminisce over DragonEgg can visit dragonegg.llvm.org.