Modern Software : LLVM

Our industry never stops changing, but sometimes those changes are trivia and fluffy. Sometimes they are fundamental and enduring. This series is going to highlight some of the most important trends happening in the hardware, software, data and architecture spaces.

The LLVM Project has been around for over a decade, but is increasingly important as a compiler infrastructure to get reuse and portability, shared optimizations and a faster time to market. Many newer programming languages have chosen it as the basis of their toolchain including Swift, Julia, Rust and more. In this talk, we will talk about the tools, components and layers of LLVM and how it is helping usher in new visions of portability and reuse.

Modern software developers need modern tools to address the changing world around them.

We will cover:

• The traditional architecture of compiler systems
• The history of the LLVM project
• An overview of how it is being used by pretty much everybody
• The porcelain and plumbing portions of the toolchain
• The role of optimization in compiler systems
• Generating cross-compiled and portable code
• How LLVM is going to help mediate the impact and effects of the changing hardware landscape