Open-source activities around the completely open RISC-V instruction set architecture sure are heating up. Alex Bradbury is proposing now that the RISC-V compiler backend be merged in LLVM.

GCC has been arguably leading with its RISC-V architecture support, but developers hope this new LLVM backend will be able to be competitive for RISC-V.

For those who haven't been paying attention to RISC-V, it's an open-source instruction set architecture that is BSD licensed and is completely free and not encumbered by patents. LowRISC and SiFive are among the organizations working to bring RISC-V hardware to the real-world.

Details on the proposed RISC-V backend integration work for LLVM can be found via this mailing list post.