LLVM Developers Still Discussing SPIR-V Support Within Clang

One of the features that didn't materialize for LLVM / Clang 7.0 is the SPIR-V support within the compiler toolchain.

While there has been a SPIR-V / LLVM translator out-of-tree and various developers at different vendors have been discussing for months the prospects of adding SPIR-V intermediate representation support to LLVM/Clang, it has yet to materialize.

The latest developer discussion is to have a roundtable talk on the SPIR-V integration at the 2018 LLVM Developers' Meeting. This year the LLVM Developers' Meeting is happening at the San Jose Convention Center from 17 to 18 October.

Items still to be thought out include the generation of SPIR-V binaries within LLVM, importing and linking SPIR-V libraries/binaries, targeting in Clang for the next OpenCL C/C++ features, and handling external tools.

Hopefully this SPIR-V support can be settled soon for mainline LLVM/Clang given all the interesting prospects of better toolchain integration and code re-use to benefit OpenCL/Vulkan and LLVM ecosystems once there is this official route for going to/from this official Khronos IR.