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A comment on LLVM Backend for the VideoCore4, Raspberry Pi 2 VPU. Parent comment

Re:LLVM Backend for the VideoCore4, Raspberry Pi 2 VPU by sanxiyn on Monday May 02, 2016 @09:38PM (#11617211)
It is beneficial in that it discourages proprietary backends to LLVM which are not contributed back to LLVM. It is the same benefit GCC enjoys by using GPL.
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Re:LLVM Backend for the VideoCore4, Raspberry Pi 2 VPU by crazysim on Monday May 02, 2016 @10:03PM (#11617295)
Does Apple have some proprietary backends? I guess they have the resources to maintain such.
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Re:LLVM Backend for the VideoCore4, Raspberry Pi 2 VPU by duaneb on Monday May 02, 2016 @11:31PM (#11617695)
Yes, they definitely do.
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Re:LLVM Backend for the VideoCore4, Raspberry Pi 2 VPU by gsnedders on Tuesday May 03, 2016 @02:41AM (#11618432)
Like what, nowadays? I know their ARM64 backend was, but what is now? Do they still maintain forks of them? (With more target data for their SoCs?)
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Re:LLVM Backend for the VideoCore4, Raspberry Pi 2 VPU by willvarfar on Tuesday May 03, 2016 @03:00AM (#11618506)
Swift is still out-of-tree.
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Re:LLVM Backend for the VideoCore4, Raspberry Pi 2 VPU by jevinskie on Tuesday May 03, 2016 @02:59AM (#11618501)
GPUs.
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Re:LLVM Backend for the VideoCore4, Raspberry Pi 2 VPU by sklogic on Tuesday May 03, 2016 @04:45AM (#11618927)
There is a reason proprietary backends would always be necessary.

Hardware companies are very touchy about the patents, and not publishing an ISA-related work may often be the only way to protect from the trolls.

Such companies would often encourage (privately or publicly) clean room 3rd party backends, and I'm pretty sure that the one we're discussing here is exactly of this kind. But they would be scared to death to allow any of their employees to even send a tiny patch to a compiler backend, if it could expose some microarchitecture knowledge that was not published.

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Re:LLVM Backend for the VideoCore4, Raspberry Pi 2 VPU by ashitlerferad on Tuesday May 03, 2016 @01:42AM (#11618206)
Sounds like the LLVM project should be using the GPL.

This constant churn kind of turns the MIT license into the GPL but only for small companies and individuals who can't keep up with the churn. I guess that is why Apple likes LLVM.

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