[linux-audio-user] Aldrin 0.9 and llvm (what it is about)

[Leonard Ritter]

On Mon, 2007-01-22 at 16:16 +0100, Thomas Kuther wrote:
> Yes, I (and maybe others) would be interested. I never heard of it
> before and am just starting to see what it is good for.

In my 7 years of experience using Buzz, I noticed that often there was a
big hassle involved with sharing (often quite exotic) dsp plugins.
Downloading a song for Buzz is usually not enough, you also require the
machines associated with it, and until you get everything running, time
passes.

Lunar was designed to solve that problem by shipping sources and
precompiled LLVM bytecode per plugin in each song, for all plugins
required. Another user, regardless of platform and operating system,
would then be able to open that song without having to acquire any
additional dependencies. This way, songs saved as ccm modules could be
shared back and forth without any additional dependencies, allowing
quick collaboration.

Even if plugins get updated, old songs would still carry all information
neccessary to get them working. Legacy code would always be connected to
the data that needs it.

LLVM serves as a JIT-compiler, loading and translating the LLVM bytecode
on runtime. LLVM-GCC is used to translate C++ code to LLVM bytecode.

LLVM is currently being used by Apple to optimize their OpenGL pipeline,
and considered a possible new default backend for the GNU compiler
suite.

> 
> Currently all i know about it is that it tends to cause massive
> headaches for packagers and others trying to compile it :)

LLVM is top notch bleeding edge stuff, and this is the first application
that requires it. I could, alternatively, resort to shipping sources in
songs only, and use GCC locally to compile on demand. However that
approach would bring up issues related to sandboxing the code, and only
languages supported by GCC could be used (where with LLVM, the compiler
frontend does not matter).

> 
> 
-- 
Leonard Ritter

-- Freelance Art & Logic
-- http://www.leonard-ritter.com