Intel Releases Updated Cilk Plus LLVM Compiler

Intel has shipped an updated version of their Cilk Plus code compiler that's built atop LLVM.

Intel remains committed to Cilk Plus, their C/C++ programming language extension that adds multi-threaded parallel computing support. Cilk Plus mostly comes down to exploiting the cilk_for, cilk_spawn, and cilk_sync keywords for simple yet effective parallel programming.

Cilk Plus support landed in GCC 4.9 and has been supported by Intel's ICC compiler for years. Within the LLVM/Clang space, Intel is working towards support there but no mainline support has yet to be accepted (just like Intel's efforts for Clang OpenMP). For now, Intel maintains their own out-of-tree Cilk Plus LLVM-based compiler. Released on Friday was an updated version of the CIlk Plus / LLVM compiler that complies with the Cilk Plus Language Extension Specification v1.2.

Those wishing to try the LLVM-based Cilk Plus compiler can find all of the code and many more details via the GitHub project site.