[fpc-devel] The 15k bounty: Optimizing executable speed for Linux x86 / LLVM

[Simon Kissel]

Hi Ben,

>  There's one more problem I forgot to mention in my first post, and it is
>  probably a deal breaker for the original bounty: LLVM does not support
>  Borland's fastcall calling convention for i386. So you would need to add
>  support for Borland fastcall on i386 to LLVM if it has to support 
>  existing i386 inline assembly routines written for FPC/Delphi.

I don't see how not supporting fastcall would be a deal-breaker?

> As far as the point about assembly on 32 bit, while it does seem
> like that would be a problem for the bounty requirements, would it
> really be the end of the world in a more general sense? I can't
> imagine people who are still using 32-bit-hardware and writing
> 32-bit applications would complain if the LLVM backend was not available for 32-bit.

We have tons of hand-tuned Assembler library code for stuff
like encryption, and other libraries we use, have, too, even those
who are multiplatform - think mORMot, for example.

Most of our embedded platforms sadly aren't and won't be 64bit.

Cheers,

Simon