nikic's blog

It’s 2026, so it’s time for my yearly summary blog post.

A few years ago, I wrote a blog post on design issues in LLVM IR.

Another year has passed, so it’s once again time for my yearly summary blog post.

This is my second year working on LLVM at Red Hat.

Unlike miscompilations, reducing compiler crashes to a minimal test case is a straightforward process, which always follows the same general approach, and is supported by high-quality reduction tooling.

Scalar evolution (SE or SCEV) models how values change inside loops.

Conceptually, the backend of an optimizing compiler is supposed to be the part that performs CPU architecture specific optimizations, while the middle-end is target-independent.