LLVM 20 Promotes SPIR-V To Official Backend, Enabled By Default

Following a call by Intel developers last month for making the SPIR-V back-end an official target within LLVM as a promotion to its existing "experimental" backend status, the change has now been made ahead of the upcoming LLVM 20 release.

LLVM developers were in agreement to raise the SPIR-V back-end to becoming an official target within the LLVM 20 compiler codebase. SPIR-V is the intermediate representation in use by Vulkan as well as OpenGL and OpenCL and has found use-cases outside of just the Khronos APIs with Microsoft even adding SPIR-V to DirectX. SPIR-V is very important not only to graphics but GPU compute too and over the years we have seen a lot of exciting innovations around SPIR-V.

This pull that has landed in LLVM 20 Git went ahead and raised SPIR-V to an official target:

"This commit promotes the SPIR-V backend from experimental to official status. As a result, SPIR-V will be built by default, simplifying integration and increasing accessibility for downstream projects."

Excellent to see and another step forward for the widespread yet still growing SPIR-V ecosystem.

This comes ahead of the LLVM 20 code branching set to take place as soon as later today. The first LLVM 20 release candidate will be out in the coming days while the first stable release in the form of LLVM 20.1 is expected around the middle of March.