Towards the end of last week I started trying to figure out how to slot an LLVM-based JIT into IcedTea. I had a vague idea that I could simply port C1 to it, but I’m not sure that would work so well. Both existing JITs expect to manage register allocation, for example, which LLVM will have to do. So I started hacking at the build system to have it build an entirely new JIT. I called it “shark” — I was going to call it C0 what with the other JITs being called C1 and C2, but I didn’t like the mild confusion that having them named and numbered causes, and shark was too good a name to waste on a one-off dummy architecture.

And speaking of one-off dummy architectures, my “if I can build on a platform that doesn’t even exist then I can build on anything” proved short lived — it doesn’t help on architectures that do exist but have really stupid unames that need truncating. I’m talking about ARM, of course, uname freak of the cosmos. So I’m going to try and get that working this week too.