An Embeddable GCC-Based JIT Compiler Published

An experimental library has been published by a Red Hat developer that allows for an embeddable JIT compiler that's based on GCC.

GCC hasn't ventured much beyond its static compilation roles while LLVM continues to be adopted by numerous software projects for its Just-In-Time compilation abilities. However, David Malcom of Red Hat has published a "proof of concept" embeddable JIT compiler based upon the GNU Compiler Collection.

The code published on Wednesday is still a work-in-progress but it's a patch to GCC that allows the compiler to have an embeddable JIT compilation API that uses GCC as its back-end via a libgccjit.so library. The shared library can be dynamically linked into bytecode interpreters and other programs for generating native machine code at run-time.

While the code is still experimental, the Red Hat employee working on GCC hopes to eventually merge it into the mainline compiler code-base. More details on this GCC JIT compiler embeddable library can be found via its mailing list announcement.