Developer(s) GNU Project Platform GNU | Operating system | |
Initial release January 19, 2001; 16 years ago (2001-01-19) Stable release 2.0.5 (August 16, 2014; 2 years ago (2014-08-16)) [±] Type Just-in-time compilation | ||
GNU lightning is a free software library for generating assembly language code at run-time. Version 2.0, released in August 2013, supports backends for SPARC (32-bit), x86 (32- and 64-bit), MIPS, ARM, ia64, HPPA and PowerPC (32-bit).
Contents
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—into the target architecture's machine language.
Disadvantages
It does not provide register allocation, data-flow or control-flow analysis, or optimization.
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
Racket, GNU Smalltalk, and CLISP 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.