One more for the weekend (:
I wrote about Some links on the Delphi compiler and the LLVM Compiler Infrastructure Project about a year and a half ago which caused a short discussion on the embarcadero forums. A few month later Robert Love showed his views in a response to Tim Anderson writing about Clang and LLVM in the C++ side of the toolchain. Tim Anderson wrote more about LLVM in the Delphi tool chain in September 2012, then it went quite for a while.
Since then the LLVM tool chain has integrated itself into both the C++ and Delphi toolchains and Wired wrote about LLVM.
Gunsmoker – who works at EurekaLog– wrote up some interesting comments in Rusian (I hope the English Google translation is good enough).
In my view, the LLVM tool chain opens a lot more possibilities (shared back-end for Delphi and C++, coverage of more platforms, better optimization), but is also a lot slower and makes the debugging part a lot harder as the debugger is – symbol wise – much further away from the compiler than in the traditional setting (hence the 3 levels of debugging information that got introduced in Delphi XE5 and the compatibility problem that came with it).
I’m wondering what other users in the Delphi community think about the LVVM chain: is it working good enough for you? Should it be integrated further into the Windows/OSX parts of the chain?
–jeroen
Filed under: Delphi, Delphi XE3, Delphi XE4, Delphi XE5, Development, Software Development
