GNU lightning

hideThis article has multiple issues. Please help or discuss these issues on the talk page. (Learn how and when to remove these template messages) The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia's notability guidelines for products and services. Please help to demonstrate the notability of the topic by citing reliable secondary sources that are independent of the topic and provide significant coverage of it beyond a mere trivial mention. If notability cannot be shown, the article is likely to be merged, redirected, or deleted. Find sources:  –  ·  ·  · scholar · JSTOR (August 2011) (Learn how and when to remove this template message) This article relies too much on references to primary sources. Please improve this by adding secondary or tertiary sources. (August 2011) (Learn how and when to remove this template message) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)

GNU lightning

Developer(s)	GNU Project
Initial release	January 19, 2001; 20 years ago (2001-01-19)[1]
Stable release	2.1.3 (September 18, 2019; 23 months ago (2019-09-18)[2])
Operating system	Cross-platform
Platform	GNU
Type	Just-in-time compilation
License	GNU General Public License, GNU Lesser General Public License
Website	Official website

GNU lightning is a free-software library for generating assembly language code at run-time. Version 2.1.3, released in September 2019, supports backends for SPARC (32-bit), x86 (32- and 64-bit), MIPS, ARM (32- and 64-bit), ia64, HPPA, PowerPC (32-bit), Alpha, S390 and RISC-V (64-bit).^[3][4]

Advantages over other libraries[]

The features GNU lightning provides make it useful for Just-in-Time Compilation. In comparison to libraries such as LLVM or libJIT, GNU lightning provides only a low-level interface for assembling from a standardized RISC assembly language—loosely based on the SPARC and MIPS architectures^[5]—into the target architecture's machine language.

Disadvantages[]

It does not provide register allocation, data-flow or control-flow analysis, or optimization.^{[citation needed]}

Instruction set[]

GNU lightning's instruction set is based loosely on existing RISC architectures.

Types[]

When required instructions handle data with these 9 types:

Projects that use GNU lightning[]

GNU Smalltalk,^[6] GNU Guile,^[7] and CLISP^[8] make use of GNU lightning for just-in-time compilation. GNU lightning was first developed as a tool to be used in GNU Smalltalk's dynamic translator from bytecodes to native code.^[9]

References[]

External links[]

• GNU lightning on Free Software Directory

This free and open-source software article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by .

• v
• t