from Hacker News

LLVM backend for m88k architecture

by fcambus on 7/23/22, 12:55 PM with 10 comments

  • by kristopolous on 7/24/22, 6:54 AM

    Out of curiosity, is this purely enthusiast and hobbyist or do people do this for more than recreation?

    Maybe there's say, large industrial machines (think like an oil refinery), infrastructure level computers (think the elevators of a skyscraper built in the 90s) or say, shipping vessels stuck with these chips and this is actually the cheapest solution, I have no idea.

    It looks like the end of the line here was the MC88110 in 1992. Don't get me wrong, hobby away, I'm just curious if there's any production reason for this.

  • by neilv on 7/24/22, 4:04 AM

    On a tangent, but the first m88k computer I recall hearing about was the Data General AViiON, which they advertised as "mainframe in a pizza box".

    Looking for a copy of the ad just now, I found a neat writeup by the person who says they came up with it: http://www.georgelois.com/data-general.html

  • by CalChris on 7/24/22, 4:02 AM

    It looks like a pretty sophisticated GISel implementation, native without any DAGISel fallback. Pretty cool. They should probably email Chris Lattner for an ELF.h EM_xxx number even if they don't submit it.

    I like it.

  • by dark-star on 7/24/22, 11:56 AM

    I wonder if LLVM is more open for keeping support for ancient systems like this in-tree than gcc.

    I know a few people working on an LLVM backend for SGI MIPS CPUs, for example.

    As I understand it, keeping an LLVM backend updated with the main compiler is far less work than keeping a GCC backend up-to-date, so the burden for supporting exotic/ancient systems is much lower

  • by ninefathom on 7/23/22, 8:33 PM

    Oh my... might have to go dig out my MVME187 and the VME cabinet.

    Or maybe I'll just fire up gxemul. Tough call.

    Either way, very nifty. Thanks for sharing!

  • by arunc on 7/24/22, 4:47 AM

    Kai is also a core contributor to LDC, a LLVM based compiler for D.

  • by cbmuser on 7/24/22, 8:36 AM

    I wonder whether this project is based on the work in our M68k backend:

    > https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/tree/main/llvm/lib/Targ...