The LLVM 64-bit ARM64/AArch64 Back-Ends Have Merged

Written by Michael Larabel in LLVM on 24 May 2014 at 09:45 AM EDT. 1 Comment
LLVM
Back in March Apple open-sourced their ARM 64-bit LLVM back-end (dubbed ARM64) many months after other ARM vendors had already developed a competing 64-bit ARM back-end (dubbed "AArch64" as ARM's official name for architecture). Since Apple opened up their back-end, Apple and outside LLVM developers have been working to converge the competing 64-bit ARM back-ends into a single 64-bit ARM target. That work is now complete.

The LLVM 64-bit back-end merging that they have been doing over the past several weeks is merging all of the features/improvements found within the existing AArch64 compiler back-end into Apple's "ARM64" back-end that was overall in better shape and easier to be on the receiving end of this work. All of those improvements have now landed into the ARM64 back-end where there's no regressions compared to either back-end previously and everything is in good shape. With that aligned, within the LLVM code-base the Apple ARM64 back-end was then renamed to AArch64 to reflect the official 64-bit ARM architecture title.

The change-over happened this morning with nuking the old back-end and then the renaming. There were also changed to Clang that happened this Saturday morning for the back-end shake-up.

This new and improved 64-bit ARM back-end will be part of LLVM 3.5 that should be officially released in August.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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