[cairo] JIT for pixman

[Behdad Esfahbod]

Dan Amelang wrote:
> 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.

But linking cairo to LLVM is not something many people will be fond of.

behdad

> Dan