Leaderboard

Indeed, LLVM is a fantastic compiler library; full-feaured, powerful, and well-designed. As mentioned in the linked article, LabVIEW has been using it to implement the backend of our compiler since LV2010. We hope to make even better use of LLVM's features in the future, such as improved vectorization of user G code, and supporting generating AVX instructions on supported processors, and other things. One thing limiting our ability to fully harness the power of LLVM is compile-time performance, however. LLVM is a lot more sophisticated than our pre-2010 legacy compiler, and takes several times longer to generate machine code. Certain pathologically large or complex VIs can cause compile times which are unacceptably long, and this is the reason for the "compiler complexity threshold" setting which gives users a way to conditionally disable LLVM for large/complex VIs. Unfortunately, having to continue to support our legacy compiler backend hinders our ability to fully leverage LLVM, because anything we implement using LLVM has to have an alternative way to implement without it, or be optionally disabled. We have been researching ways to mitigate the compiler time issues, so that compile time is always linearly proportional to G code size, and hope to remove the Compiler Complexity Threshold in the future, or tweak its function to reduce optimization levels rather than disabling LLVM entirely. LLVM is being constantly improved and refined by the LLVM team and the open source community, and we're excited to be able to continually draw on new features and optimizations as LLVM matures over time.

Go Sphero with V I Engineering, Inc.! We'll be giving away 2 Spheros - you can control them with your smartphone as a remote control, play games with it, and more! Sphero is an Orbotix Smart Robot on the inside and an opaque, high-impact polycarbonate shell on the outside. It's even waterproof. With speeds of up to 3ft per second and a 50ft plus range, Sphero's Bluetooth connection makes him ready to play as fast as you can launch an app Why would you say that?!? I'm in Michigan!

In keeping with our tradition of analog creativity, Bolder Software is giving away a Korg Monotron Delay Analog Ribon Synthesizer:

Symbio will give away 3 UML Architect GOOP Development Licences.