Visit npopov.com → RSS feedOn Hacker News Jun 2021 – Jan 2026
Software Engineering 4Systems & Performance 3Web & Frontend 1
A few years ago, I wrote a blog post on design issues in LLVM IR . Since then, one of these issues has been fixed fully (opaque pointers migration), one has been mostly fixed (constant expression removal), and one is well on the way towards being fixed (ptradd migration).
On the whole, LLVM has a well-designed intermediate representation (IR), which is specified in the language reference . However, there are a number of areas where design mistakes have been made. And while the LLVM project is generally open to addressing such issues, mistakes in core IR design tend to be firmly…
The opcache PHP extension implements various functionality to speed up PHP in a transparent manner. As the name indicates, its origin and primary purpose is opcode caching, but nowadays it also contains an optimizer and just-in-time compiler. However, this blog post will focus only on the opcode caching aspect.
Towards the end of last year, I switched from working on PHP at JetBrains, to working on LLVM at Red Hat. While it was already under discussion beforehand, this catalyzed the creation of the PHP foundation , which now pays multiple people to work on PHP. Special thanks for this go to Roman Pronskiy, who did most of…