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Comment by msutherl | Hacker News Reader

I love the community of languages that have adopted LLVM as a back-end: http://llvm.org/docs/ReleaseNotes.html#external-open-source-...

Pure, FAUST, Julia, Clay are all very promising and I didn't know about Open Shading Language or Portable OpenCL.

[1] http://code.google.com/p/pure-lang/

[2] http://faust.grame.fr/

[3] http://julialang.org/

[4] http://claylabs.com/clay/

[5] https://github.com/imageworks/OpenShadingLanguage/

[6] http://pocl.sourceforge.net/

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You missed my favorite LLVM-based project, ispc[1].

In a nutshell, it brings nVidia's SPMD programming model to normal SIMD-capable processors. Any CUDA code out there is almost trivial to convert.

[1] http://ispc.github.com/

Haskell and Rust are also worthy of mention here.

Does GHC use the LLVM backend by default or do you have to manually enable that?

No, the default backend is the native code generator. You need to use the -fllvm flag to enable the LLVM backend.

http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/7.6.1/html/users_guide/code-...

"[The LLVM backend] is an alternative backend that uses the LLVM compiler to produce executable code. It generally produces code as with performance as good as the native code generator but for some cases can produce much faster code. This is especially true for numeric, array heavy code using packages like vector. The penalty is a significant increase in compilation times."

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