A benefit of using LLVM for JIT compilation

[Dibyendu Majumdar <mobile@...>]

Obviously the biggest benefit is that there is an army of engineers
working on LLVM, from Google, Apple, IBM, and even Microsoft
now-a-days. This means that one is relying on the collective power of
so many engineers.

The other benefit seems to me the resulting simplicity of the JIT
implementation in Ravi. I don't know how Lua code size is measured but
here is a simplistic estimate of the number of lines of code that is
in Ravi for implementing the JIT compiler:

wc -l include/ravi_llvm*.h src/ravi_llvm*.c*
     166 include/ravi_llvm.h
    1086 include/ravi_llvmcodegen.h
     344 src/ravi_llvmarith1.cpp
     832 src/ravi_llvmarith2.cpp
     172 src/ravi_llvmcall.cpp
    1865 src/ravi_llvmcodegen.cpp
     324 src/ravi_llvmcomp.cpp
     453 src/ravi_llvmforloop.cpp
     763 src/ravi_llvmforprep.cpp
     593 src/ravi_llvmjit.cpp
     421 src/ravi_llvmload.cpp
    1504 src/ravi_llvmluaapi.cpp
      52 src/ravi_llvmrest.cpp
      96 src/ravi_llvmreturn.cpp
     728 src/ravi_llvmtable.cpp
     140 src/ravi_llvmtforcall.cpp
    1250 src/ravi_llvmtypes.cpp
   10789 total