The Open64 Compiler Seeing Some Recent Changes, clang2whirl Clang Open64 Front-End

Prior to LLVM/Clang becoming so popular within organizations and it maturing well on x86_64, AArch64, and other architectures, Open64 was once quite popular in areas now dominated by LLVM and GCC. Open64 had been popular with academic researchers, AMD even maintained their Open64 optimized compiler a decade prior to the LLVM-based AOCC, and was quite popular in the HPC space. Surprisingly there's been some recent activity on the Open64 compiler code.

I was surprised this week when I was notified of a new Open64 release on GitHub. Though the new release was tagged as clang-prebuilt and the first open64-compiler release ever under the GitHub infrastructure. But this wasn't much about Open64 itself as providing a reference pre-built Clang 11 and Clang 14 implementations that can be used for building Open64's clang2whirl.

The clang2whirl is a Clang-based Open64 front-end developed by Xcalibyte (Shenzhen) Limited. It's been in development for several years now and this clang-prebuilt provides a compatible reference build of LLVM Clang for in turn building out this Open64 front-end.

When it comes to code activity on the Open64 compiler, there's been activity as recently as last month and a number of commits this year. The commit activity appears to be periodic but heavy at times.

Back in the day when it was GCC vs. Open64 world... I still have AMD Open64 mousepads somewhere.

In any event it's interesting to see this recent activity around the Open64 compiler and the clang2whirl front-end. Those interested can find the in-development code via open64-compiler/open64 on GitHub.