Hi all,

I was wondering what’s the current status of the “Improved LLVM backend” project

( https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/ImprovedLLVMBackend ). The page mentions a

few main problems, but some seem to be already fixed:

1) Using/supporting only one version of LLVM.

   This has been done AFAIK.

2) Prebuilt binaries to be shipped together with GHC.

   I can't find anything about this. Is there a ticket? Has there been any

   progress on this?

3) Adding support for split-objs

   I found a ticket about it: https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/8300

   which was closed as WONTFIX in favor of split-sections. So I guess this can

   also be considered as done.

4) Figuring out what LLVM optimizations are useful.

   Again, I can seem to find anything here. Has anyone looked at this?

   I only found an issue about this:

   https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/11295

The page also mentions that the generated IR could be improved in many cases,

but it doesn't link to any tickets or discussions. Is there something I could

read to better understand what are the main problems?

The only thing I can recall is that proc point splitting is likely to cause

issues for LLVM's ability to optimize the code. (but I only found a couple of email

threads about this but couldn't find any follow-ups)

Thanks,

Michal