Bill Wendling Leaves LLVM Release Manager Role

Written by Michael Larabel in LLVM on 14 October 2014 at 07:18 PM EDT. 28 Comments
LLVM
Some weeks ago on Twitter a follower had mentioned a rumor that Apple was forcing its compiler developers to focus less on general LLVM work and to basically spend their time on Apple's new Swift project. While there's been a general slowdown of direct Apple contributions to LLVM, there's the latest sign today they might be divesting their interest somewhat in direct management of this open-source compiler infrastructure.

Earlier this year LLVM was spun off into its own, independent, non-profit foundation while Apple developers have continued making contributions to LLVM and its sub-projects like the Clang C/C++ compiler and libc++. However, since then and following the public announcement of Apple's Swift language there seems to be a bit less of Apple involvement as brought up by Phoronix readers while today is perhaps the most telling sign of Apple developers becoming less involved with the day-to-day development of LLVM: relieving release manager controls.

Bill Wendling who formerly served as LLVM's release manager under his roles on Apple's compiler team (UPDATE: my apologies, I've just found out that Bill Wendling quietly left Apple about one year ago and is now working for Google), is looking to hand off those duties.

Bill Wendling wrote, "After several years as LLVM release manager, I’ve decided to step down as release manager. I recently haven’t been able to focus as much time on LLVM development as I should, and I don’t want the releases to suffer because of that. I’ve enjoyed all of the releases I’ve done. We have a great team of testers. And the community as a whole really helps out so that we can produce a great produce."

To succeed him as LLVM's release manager, Bill has proposed either AMD's Tom Stellard or Google's Hans Wennborg. Tom Stellard seems to be the front-runner right now given that he's done LLVM stable point releases in the past -- with AMD having a vested interest in new LLVM releases now that they're dependent upon LLVM compiler infrastructure updates for shipping improvements to their GPU LLVM back-end used on Linux. Besides managing the LLVM point releases of recent times, Tom Stellard was the key developer to this AMD GPU LLVM back-end. Hans Wennborg at Google has been a longtime contributor as well.
Related News
About The Author
Michael Larabel

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.

Popular News This Week