[chrisseaton]

It's great to see a blog post that basically presents a negative result - LLVM hasn't sped up peak performance and has slowed warmup. Often people will try something and if it doesn't work well will never write it up so you'll never hear about it.

[illumen]

Indeed. Hearing about how things didn't work out is highly instructional too.

In the past LLVM has been almost completely unusable for dynamic languages. Not it seems there are dynamic two implementations using it (at least JavaScriptCore). So this is a pretty good result.

The other good result is that it shows with LLVM other architectures were supported than x86.

I know at least pypy and unladen swallow have tried to use it in the past (5+ years ago) with no success.

[chrisseaton]

Rubinius is also trying LLVM with very limited success. It's really clear you need an entire IR and optimisation pipeline before you emit LLVM if you are implementing a dynamic language. Then you're only using LLVM for instruction selection, scheduling and emitting so it doesn't seem as helpful anymore. Is there any project trying to provide the IR and pipeline before LLVM which could work across languages?

[michel-slm]

Unladen Swallow was abandoned, but for Python there is now Dropbox's Pyston - https://github.com/dropbox/pyston