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llvm-mirror/docs/ReleaseNotes.rst
Jakob Stoklund Olesen 248a113326 Mention the new TableGen pattern format in the release notes.
Make threats about removing the old syntax.

llvm-svn: 177848
2013-03-25 00:36:53 +00:00

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======================
LLVM 3.3 Release Notes
======================
.. contents::
:local:
.. warning::
These are in-progress notes for the upcoming LLVM 3.3 release. You may
prefer the `LLVM 3.2 Release Notes <http://llvm.org/releases/3.2/docs
/ReleaseNotes.html>`_.
Introduction
============
This document contains the release notes for the LLVM Compiler Infrastructure,
release 3.3. Here we describe the status of LLVM, including major improvements
from the previous release, improvements in various subprojects of LLVM, and
some of the current users of the code. All LLVM releases may be downloaded
from the `LLVM releases web site <http://llvm.org/releases/>`_.
For more information about LLVM, including information about the latest
release, please check out the `main LLVM web site <http://llvm.org/>`_. If you
have questions or comments, the `LLVM Developer's Mailing List
<http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/mailman/listinfo/llvmdev>`_ is a good place to send
them.
Note that if you are reading this file from a Subversion checkout or the main
LLVM web page, this document applies to the *next* release, not the current
one. To see the release notes for a specific release, please see the `releases
page <http://llvm.org/releases/>`_.
Non-comprehensive list of changes in this release
=================================================
.. NOTE
For small 1-3 sentence descriptions, just add an entry at the end of
this list. If your description won't fit comfortably in one bullet
point (e.g. maybe you would like to give an example of the
functionality, or simply have a lot to talk about), see the `NOTE` below
for adding a new subsection.
* The CellSPU port has been removed. It can still be found in older versions.
* The IR-level extended linker APIs (for example, to link bitcode files out of
archives) have been removed. Any existing clients of these features should
move to using a linker with integrated LTO support.
* LLVM and Clang's documentation has been migrated to the `Sphinx
<http://sphinx-doc.org/>`_ documentation generation system which uses
easy-to-write reStructuredText. See `llvm/docs/README.txt` for more
information.
* TargetTransformInfo (TTI) is a new interface that can be used by IR-level
passes to obtain target-specific information, such as the costs of
instructions. Only "Lowering" passes such as LSR and the vectorizer are
allowed to use the TTI infrastructure.
* We've improved the X86 and ARM cost model.
* The Attributes classes have been completely rewritten and expanded. They now
support not only enumerated attributes and alignments, but "string"
attributes, which are useful for passing information to code generation. See
:doc:`HowToUseAttributes` for more details.
* TableGen's syntax for instruction selection patterns has been simplified.
Instead of specifying types indirectly with register classes, you should now
specify types directly in the input patterns. See ``SparcInstrInfo.td`` for
examples of the new syntax. The old syntax using register classes still
works, but it will be removed in a future LLVM release.
* ... next change ...
.. NOTE
If you would like to document a larger change, then you can add a
subsection about it right here. You can copy the following boilerplate
and un-indent it (the indentation causes it to be inside this comment).
Special New Feature
-------------------
Makes programs 10x faster by doing Special New Thing.
AArch64 target
--------------
We've added support for AArch64, ARM's 64-bit architecture. Development is still
in fairly early stages, but we expect successful compilation when:
- compiling standard compliant C99 and C++03 with Clang;
- using Linux as a target platform;
- where code + static data doesn't exceed 4GB in size (heap allocated data has
no limitation).
Some additional functionality is also implemented, notably DWARF debugging,
GNU-style thread local storage and inline assembly.
Hexagon Target
--------------
- Removed support for legacy hexagonv2 and hexagonv3 processor
architectures which are no longer in use. Currently supported
architectures are hexagonv4 and hexagonv5.
Loop Vectorizer
---------------
We've continued the work on the loop vectorizer. The loop vectorizer now
has the following features:
- Loops with unknown trip count.
- Runtime checks of pointers
- Reductions, Inductions
- If Conversion
- Pointer induction variables
- Reverse iterators
- Vectorization of mixed types
- Vectorization of function calls
- Partial unrolling during vectorization
R600 Backend
------------
The R600 backend was added in this release, it supports AMD GPUs
(HD2XXX - HD7XXX). This backend is used in AMD's Open Source
graphics / compute drivers which are developed as part of the `Mesa3D
<http://www.mesa3d.org>`_ project.
Additional Information
======================
A wide variety of additional information is available on the `LLVM web page
<http://llvm.org/>`_, in particular in the `documentation
<http://llvm.org/docs/>`_ section. The web page also contains versions of the
API documentation which is up-to-date with the Subversion version of the source
code. You can access versions of these documents specific to this release by
going into the ``llvm/docs/`` directory in the LLVM tree.
If you have any questions or comments about LLVM, please feel free to contact
us via the `mailing lists <http://llvm.org/docs/#maillist>`_.