ErLLVM: an LLVM backend for Erlang

Abstract

This paper describes ErLLVM, a new backend for the HiPE compiler, the native code compiler of Erlang/OTP, that targets the LLVM compiler infrastructure. Besides presenting the overall architecture of ErLLVM and its integration in Erlang/OTP, we describe the changes to LLVM that ErLLVM required and discuss technical challenges and decisions we took. Finally, we provide a detailed performance evaluation of ErLLVM compared to BEAM, the existing backends of the HiPE compiler, and Erjang.