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You want to create LLVM alternative and you write it in C?

I'm saying this as someone who uses LLVM daily and wishes that it was written in anything else than C/CPP,

those languages bring so many cons that it is unreal.

Slow compilation, mediocre tooling (cmake), terrible error messages, etc, etc.

What's the point of starting with tech debt?



It will be so much refreshing if someone write LLVM alternative in D language, its compilation speed is much faster than many compiled languages.

Having said that perhaps Tilde can be a good compiler addition for D in addition to the existing GDC (GCC), LCD (LLVM) and the reference compiler DMD.

It's interesting to note that Odin is implementing its compiler alternative in Tilde maybe due to some unresolved issues and bugs in LLVM [1],[2].

[1] A review of the Odin programming language (2022):

https://graphitemaster.github.io/odin_review/

[2] Understanding the Odin Programming Language (97 comments):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42348655


Why not in Go/C#/Rust/Java or Kotlin/etc?


1. C is universal, any other language is a dependency.

2. If you're using something like C# or Kotlin or whatever, then you're not serious about compilation speed.

3. You will need to provide a C API anyway.


>C is universal, any other language is a dependency.

Executable is executable, there's no magic in C code, it's just frontend for LLVM IR.

>If you're using something like C# or Kotlin or whatever, then you're not serious about compilation speed.

Do you have any good benchmarks about how big the difference is?




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