On March 18, 2023, LLVM, a renowned international open-source software community released version 16.0.0 which provides comprehensive support for the LoongArch instruction set architecture (ISA), with the LoongArch target promoted to "official".

Thus far, the five most foundational software (Big Five) in the open-source world — namely the Linux kernel, GCC, LLVM, Glibc, and Binutils — have all released official versions that support LoongArch. Subsequent releases of operating systems based on LoongArch will be able to be built directly upon the upstream community versions, which indicates that the LoongArch software ecosystem is entering a new stage of rapid development.

Introduction to LLVM

LLVM is one of the most important frameworks for designing and developing compilers nowadays. It provides the well-known C/C++ compiler frontend clang, as well as compilation framework support for many other programming languages, such as Rust. Numerous large software projects, including Chromium, utilize LLVM as their compilation and building tool.

LLVM Project Fully Supports LoongArch

According to the official release notes of the LLVM community (https://releases.llvm.org/), the LoongArch target was promoted from "experimental" to "official" in LLVM 16.0.0. This means that the LoongArch backend will be compiled by default on any platform without needing to specify additional CMake options.

Screenshot of the LLVM 16.0.0 release notes

Furthermore, LoongArch has received more comprehensive support from the entire LLVM project. Advanced capabilities such as OrcJIT and GHC calling convention, and support in subprojects like clang, compiler-rt, lldb, openmp, and libunwind are added.

Loongson: Active Contributor of Source Code

Loongson Technology has contributed a total of 65,000 lines of source code to the LLVM community since 2022, making itself one of the largest institutional contributors to the community. In addition, open-source developers from both China and abroad have contributed almost 5,000 lines of code in support of LoongArch to the LLVM community. As an emerging instruction set architecture, LoongArch is gaining increasingly widespread recognition and support from the open-source community.