LLVM will win the Turing Award (prediction)
The LLVM Project, which focuses on “modular and reusable compiler technologies” has had an enormous impact on the field of compilers, and by extension almost every kind of “applied” computer science.
Though compilers (at the time of writing) is not my area of expertise, LLVM’s impact on my own field of “numerical computing” is undeniable. Examples include:
- the compiler for the Chapel programming language
- the Flang and LFortran compilers for the Fortran programming language
- Intel’s IFX compiler for the Fortran programming language (it was the discovery that IFX was using LLVM that that spurred me to make this post) (Intel URLs are famous for breaking, apologies in advance)
- the compiler for the Julia programming language
Needless to say, I strongly believe that one or both of Chris Lattner and Vikram Adve (the original authors of LLVM) will win the Turing Award for their work on LLVM. In the event that they do not win I will be extremely disappointed.
Evidence of prediction
To make this a bonafide prediction it’s necessary to provide some evidence that my prediction was made in advance of the award (if it occurs). To this end I provide the git commit hash for the commit which adds this post: 6924275f9ef350dc3ce48daf4f85c908a867bd17
(Since entering the hash of course changes the hash, I added the hash and a link to the commit one commit after the post.)