DragonEgg Now Works With GCC 8, LLVM 6

It's been a while since having anything to report on with regards to DragonEgg, but that changed today.

DragonEgg as a reminder is an open-source plugin for GCC that replaces the GNU Compiler Collection's optimizers and code generators with those from LLVM. Basically if you want to go from GCC's front-ends and then have LLVM take care of the optimizations and code generation steps. Among the use-cases for this is where GCC has language support such as with Ada and Fortran (or GCC's now dropped Java) but where LLVM/Clang/other-sub-projects do not have language support. This is also useful for being able to easily compare GCC/LLVM optimization and code generation performance.

DragonEgg has been best supported with GCC 4.6~4.8 and hasn't received too much attention in recent years. But for those still wishing to use it as a modern plug-in for GCC, it should now be working with GCC 8 development snapshots paired with the latest LLVM 6 code.

For those interested in using DragonEgg with GCC 8 built against LLVM 6, details can be found via the LLVM mailing list. Those wishing to learn more about the DragonEgg plug-in itself can visit dragonegg.llvm.org.