LLVM 1.4 Release Notes
  1. Introduction
  2. What's New?
  3. Installation Instructions
  4. Portability and Supported Platforms
  5. Known Problems
  6. Additional Information

Written by the LLVM team

Introduction

This document contains the release notes for the LLVM compiler infrastructure, release 1.4. Here we describe the status of LLVM, including any known problems and bug fixes from the previous release. The most up-to-date version of this document can be found on the LLVM 1.4 web site. If you are not reading this on the LLVM web pages, you should probably go there because this document may be updated after the release.

For more information about LLVM, including information about potentially more current releases, please check out the main web site. If you have questions or comments, the LLVM developer's mailing list is a good place to send them.

Note that if you are reading this file from CVS, this document applies to the next release, not the current one. To see the release notes for the current or previous releases, see the releases page.

What's New?

This is the fifth public release of the LLVM compiler infrastructure.

At this time, LLVM is known to correctly compile and run all C & C++ SPEC CPU95 & 2000 benchmarks, the Olden benchmarks, and the Ptrdist benchmarks, and many other C and C++ programs.

This release implements the following new features:
  1. The test/Programs hierarchy has been moved out of the main LLVM tree into a separate CVS repo and tarball.
  2. LLVM now optimizes global variables significantly more than it did before.
  3. LLVM now includes the new 'undef' value and unreachable instruction, which give the optimizer more information about the behavior of the program.
  4. The LLVM makefiles have been improved to build LLVM much faster and includes new targets (like make dist-check).
  5. The LLVM source code is now compatible with Microsoft Visual C++.
In this release, the following missing features were implemented:
  1. JIT interface should support arbitrary calls
In this release, the following Quality of Implementation issues were fixed:
  1. [llvmg++] Tons of warnings are spewed when linking to libstdc++
  2. include/{Support,Config} -> include/llvm/{Support,Config}
In this release, the following build problems were fixed:
This release includes the following Code Quality improvements:
  1. Ugly code generated for std::min/std::max
In this release, the following bugs in the previous release were fixed:

Bugs fixed in the LLVM Core:

  1. [licm] LICM invalidates alias analysis info and uses broken information (optimizer crash)
  2. [asmwriter] Asmwriter is really slow for functions with lots of values
  3. [anders-aa] Andersen's AA is completely broken in LLVM 1.3
  4. [bcwriter] Empty compaction tables defined
  5. [X86] llc output for functions w/certain names tickles GNU 'as' bugs

Bugs in the C/C++ front-end:

  1. [llvmg++] not enough templates are instantiated
  2. [llvmg++] Extern const globals cannot be marked 'constant' if they have nontrivial ctors or dtors

Bugs fixed in the Sparc V9 back-end:

  1. [sparcv9] regalloc assertion failure with certain indirect calls
Portability and Supported Platforms

LLVM is known to work in the following platforms:

The core LLVM infrastructure uses GNU autoconf to adapt itself to the machine and operating system on which it is built. However, minor porting may be required to get LLVM to work on new platforms. We welcome your portability patches and reports of successful builds or error messages.

Note that the LLVM build system does not currently support directories with spaces on them when running on Win32/cygwin. We strongly recommend running LLVM and the C frontend out of a top-level directory without spaces (e.g., /cygdrive/c/llvm). Also, make sure to install all of the cygwin packages. By default, many important tools are not installed that are needed by the LLVM build process or test suite (e.g., /bin/time). Finally, please make sure that there are no directories with spaces in them in your PATH environment variable.

Known Problems

This section contains all known problems with the LLVM system, listed by component. As new problems are discovered, they will be added to these sections. If you run into a problem, please check the LLVM bug database and submit a bug if there isn't already one.

Experimental features included with this release

The following components of this LLVM release are either untested, known to be broken or unreliable, or are in early development. These components should not be relied on, and bugs should not be filed against them, but they may be useful to some people. In particular, if you would like to work on one of these components, please contact us on the llvmdev list.

Known problems with the LLVM Core
Known problems with the C front-end
Bugs
Notes

If you run into GCC extensions which have not been included in any of these lists, please let us know (also including whether or not they work).

Known problems with the C++ front-end

For this release, the C++ front-end is considered to be fully functional but has not been tested as thoroughly as the C front-end. It has been tested and works for a number of non-trivial programs, but there may be lurking bugs. Please report any bugs or problems.

Bugs
Notes
Known problems with the X86 back-end
Known problems with the SparcV9 back-end
Known problems with the PowerPC back-end
Known problems with the C back-end
Additional Information

A wide variety of additional information is available on the LLVM web page, including mailing lists and publications describing algorithms and components implemented in LLVM. The web page also contains versions of the API documentation which is up-to-date with the CVS version of the source code. You can access versions of these documents specific to this release by going into the "llvm/doc/" directory in the LLVM tree.

If you have any questions or comments about LLVM, please feel free to contact us via the mailing lists.


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