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From: bart <bc@freeuk.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Suggested method for returning a string from a C program?
Date: Sun, 23 Mar 2025 11:25:14 +0000
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On 23/03/2025 08:50, Michael S wrote:
> On Sun, 23 Mar 2025 01:34:54 +0000
> bart <bc@freeuk.com> wrote:
> 
>>
>> It's strange: in one part of the computing world, the speed of
>> building software is a very big deal. All sorts of efforts are going
>> on to deal with it. Compilation speed for developers is always an
>> issue. There is a general movement away from LLVM-based backends
>> /because/ it is so slow.
>>
> 
> What "general movement" are you talking about?
> I can't recollect any new* language for general-purpose computers that
> is used by more than dozen* persons which is not based on LLVM back end.
> Despite its undeniable slowness.

There's Rust + Cranelift:

"The goal of this project is to create an alternative codegen backend 
for the rust compiler based on Cranelift. This has the potential to 
improve compilation times in debug mode."

There's Go which was never based on LLVM:

"At the beginning of the project we considered using LLVM for gc but 
decided it was too large and slow to meet our performance goals."

('gc' is 'Go Compiler'. Maybe Go is older than 15 years? Still, LLVM 
seems to have been around and was thought to be slow then.)

And there's Zig:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39154513

There are other's comments:

"LLVM used to be hailed as a great thing, but with language projects 
such as Rust, Zig and others complaining it's bad and slow and they're 
moving away from it – how bad is LLVM really?"

Here's is a random quote from Reddit:

"2 minutes is really good for a full build. 2 minutes is pretty bad for 
a one line change.

I also quit my job recently because of their terrible infrastructure. 
All home-grown of course. A horrible mess of Python, C++ and Make.

So demotivating. And nobody except me cared."

TBH, for me 2 minutes would be really terrible even for a full build. So 
would 2 seconds! (How big was this executable?)