[cairo] JIT for pixman

[Dan Amelang]

On Thu, Jan 8, 2009 at 8:24 AM, Soeren Sandmann <sandmann at daimi.au.dk> wrote:
>
> I did look at LLVM at one point, and I think it's a very good project
> in many ways. The main showstopper at the time was that it is written
> in C++ with STL, which - because GNU libstdc++ is inlining way too
> much code - meant that even a simple 'hello world' jit compiler took
> hundreds of kilobytes of text.
>
> At the time I think SIMD instructions were only supported as
> intrinsics, which basically meant that all the optimizations LLVM does
> treat them as black boxes. This means LLVM's vector output was not as
> great as it's normal scalar output.

FWIW, if I were to start over on jitblt, with the goal of producing
"real world" software, I would base it on LLVM and work on
fixing/hacking around the above issues. My intuition is that
fixing/hacking around those issues is less work and a better approach
for the long-term than the other options.

Dan