Sure, not only Alibaba, there are lots of applications of XOC. XOC has been used in Java AOT compiler, JavaScript AOT compiler and Type Inference Engine, VLIW/DSP compiler, etc. And XOC is also used in some teaching. For now, XOC is used as AI compiler to do optimization and code-generation for AI chip by some famous AI design manufacturers.
for curiosity, because I am a grad student working on AI accelerators, I just want to know why these AI manufacturers are going with XOC which is new to me instead of wide used toolchain like GCC or LLVM especially with the last one using MLIR .
Good question! In a simply word, GCC&LLVM compilers are good at traditional RISC-like hardware, namely, IR expected to be load/store/compute/branch, etc. More important is, these compilers do not allow user to add custom IR at will. AI chip operator evoloing rapidly, adding IR means the compiler needs to be overhauled. XOC is multi-level IR compiler, MLIR is not. MLIR open source later than XOC. Moreover, MLIR lack s of powerful optimizations.