InfoQ Homepage Compilers Content on InfoQ
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Profile Guided Optimization Comes to .NET Core
Profile Guided Optimization is a native compilation technology that has long been available to native code developers (i.e. Visual C++). Microsoft has announced that this technology is now available for .NET Core developers on Windows x86/x64 and Linux x64.
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Sonatype Acquires Vor Security to Expand Nexus Open-Source Component Support
Sonatype announced the acquisition of Vor Security to extend their open-source component intelligence solutions’ coverage to include Ruby, PHP, CocoaPods, Swift, Golang, C, and C++.
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Zero Runtime Exceptions in Production with Elm
At QCon London 2017, Richard Feldman, software engineer at noredink and author of “Elm in Action” from Manning, explained how their decision to switch to Elm led to a 100,000 LOC system running in production with zero runtime exceptions since 2015. Here, we provide a brief summary of Feldman’s key points.
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Facebook’s New AL Language Aims to Simplify Static Program Analysis
AL is a simple, declarative language for reasoning about abstract syntax trees that allows to extend Facebook Infer static analyzer.
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Prepack JavaScript Compiler Aims to Reduce Startup Time
Facebook has revealed Prepack, a compile time JavaScript interpreter that aims to reduce the time spent initializing code by pre-computing the global code block. The biggest beneficiaries of this tool are React Native apps and other platforms where startup time is one of the biggest performance bottlenecks.
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GCC 7.1 Released with Full C++17 Support
The latest GNU Compiler Collection major release, GCC 7.1, brings substantial new functionality, writes GCC maintainer Jakub Jelinek, including experimental support for the current C++17 draft, better diagnostics, and new optimizations.
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C++17 Is Ready
At its winter meeting in Kona, HI, USA, the ISO C++ committee has finalized work on C++17, writes Herb Sutter. A short summary of its main features here.
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Browser Vendors Start Shipping WebAssembly by Default
The browser vendors working on WebAssembly have reached a "consensus" on an initial implementation set, allowing browsers to ship it on by default. While this is an important milestone, the initial implementation won't immediately result in significant uptake by developers as important features such as DOM integration and garbage collection are not yet part of the spec.
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Visual Studio 2017 Officially Released
Marking the 20th year since Visual Studio's first release, Visual Studio 2017 has formally been made available. VS2017 focuses on improvements to its core developer experience, in addition to greater support for mobile & cloud applications as well as more capable DevOps functionality.
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LLD, LLVM’s New Linker, Coming to LLVM 4
LLD, which touts great performance improvements over GCC ld, will be included in LLVM 4 rc1 and enabled by default. Although the new linker is already able to build a running FreeBSD/amd64 base system, its inclusion in LLVM is still experimental and could be set back in rc2 if it causes problems.
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MIT Extended LLVM IR to Enable Better Optimization of Parallel Programs
Researchers at MIT have been working on a fork of LLVM to explore a new approach to optimizing parallel code by embedding fork-join parallelism directly into the compiler’s intermediate representation (IR). This, the researchers maintain, makes it possible to leverage most of the IR-level serial optimizations for parallel programs.
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Compiling on Windows without Visual Studio
Microsoft has previously offered two different build tools for those needing to compile code without installing Visual Studio. The new Visual Studio Build Tools package combines these into a single tool.
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WebAssembly Browser Preview Asks Community for Feedback
The upcoming WebAssembly technology has reached the browser preview stage where major browser vendors have released a stable and compatible version of the language. They are now asking the community to use it and provide feedback.
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Visual Studio 15 Improves C++ Project Loading
Visual Studio in the past has struggled with large solutions. Visual Studio 15 seeks to improve project load times for C++ developers with a new feature called Faster Project Load.
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How Facebook Redesigned the HHVM JIT Compiler for Performance
In the Summer of 2013, Facebook engineers started a major redesign of the HHVM JIT compiler that brought an overall 15% reduction of CPU usage on Facebook’s web servers. Facebook engineer Guilherme Ottoni has recently described how Facebook achieved that result by backing profile-guided optimizations (PGO) into their JIT compiler.