LLVM powered Mono

Mono from SVN is now able to use LLVM as a backend for code generation in addition to Mono's built-in JIT compiler.

This allows Mono to benefit from all of the compiler optimizations done in LLVM. For example the SciMark score goes from 482 to 610.

This extra performance comes at a cost: it consumes more time and more memory to JIT compile using LLVM than using Mono's built-in JIT, so it is not a solution for everyone.

Long running desktop applications like Banshee and Gnome-Do want to keep memory usage low and also would most likely not benefit from better code generation. Our own tests show that ASP.NET applications do not seem to benefit very much (but web apps are inherently IO-bound).

But computationally intensive applications will definitely benefit from this. Financial and scientific users will surely appreciate this performance boosthttp://www.mono-project.com/.

Taking it out for a spin

Note: the notes here are no longer relevant, these applied to Mono back in 2009. LLVM has now been integrated into Mono, follow the steps in http://www.mono-project.com/Mono_LLVM instead

You need to install both LLVM and Mono from SVN.

Get and install LLVM like this:

$ svn co http://llvm.org/svn/llvm-project/llvm/trunk llvm
$ cd llvm
$ ./configure --prefix=/mono --enable-optimized
$ make && make install

Then get Mono, and you need to apply a tiny patch to configure.in.

$ wget https://tirania.org/tmp/m7a9da378.txt
$ svn co svn://anonsvn.mono-project.com/source/trunk/mcs 
$ svn co svn://anonsvn.mono-project.com/source/trunk/mono 
$ cd mono
$ patch -p1 < m7a9da378.txt
$ ./autogen.sh --prefix=/mono --enable-llvm=yes
$ make && make install

Now you have an LLVM-powered Mono.

LLVM is not able to support some of the features that Mono needs, so in those cases the JIT compiler will still fall back to Mono's JIT engine (methods that contain try/catch clauses or methods that do interface calls).

This backend was written by Zoltan.