Comments on Next year's trends reported today: Portable Linux future using LLVM

Ben et al, good thoughts. The good news is that L...

2009-05-07T12:37:00.000-07:00

Ben et al, good thoughts. The good news is that LLVM can be "staged in" for use as a Linux distro. One could start with a native kernel, some native libs/apps, and some LLVM ones. As the technology/adoptions evolves, more things could be shifted to the LLVM camp. As was mentioned, caching is useful. Though one more simplistic way to go about it, is to do the translation from LLVM to native at install time. The user would only ever see native, but it would be tailored to their hardware.

This is very interesting -- I wonder how using LLV...

2009-05-06T23:14:00.000-07:00

This is very interesting -- I wonder how using LLVM to build "portable" Linux OS's balances the need to do enough of the "compiling" such that subsequent system-level optimizations do not take so long that it'd be easier to just re-build the system in its entirety and the need to not compile so much as to retain sufficient flexibility to make a meaningful impact for hardware variations.

The answer to that question probably also determines to some degree the final performance of the OS -- which leads to a final question, how much system-specific adaptation can one milk out of LLVM and does it compensate for any performance hit that's necessitated by the need to do some of the compiling of the kernel in a least-common-denominator fashion to get to the intermediate representation.

Maybe use something more sofisticated, which has a...

2009-04-17T08:48:00.000-07:00

Maybe use something more sofisticated, which has a thoughtful design, maybe something based on Common Intermediate Language and .NET? It is the basic idea of .NET design to be portable.

Good idea, but it must solve some issues either we...

2009-04-10T09:32:00.000-07:00

Good idea, but it must solve some issues either well or die.
-Whatever decision is taken, startup time may not get worse at all, "recompiling" every time and/or caching - is a thing Java already does so no need to reinvent the wheel even if it would seem a better implementation, the recompilation for your target machine should probably be done while/after application installation instead.
-Even if LLVM gets perfect it would still require a lot of energy to get the industry start using it which could prove more difficult than creating LLVM for different reasons.