Consider exposing numba's pycc

[alendit]

Hi,

pycc is a greatly useful module in combination with llvmlite.

While I understand that the development of llvmlite is mainly driven by the needs of numba and the standalone of it is a more minor goal, llvmlite is the most popular and reliable LLVM library right now and the user would profit a great deal from being able to easily emit python importable modules.

Cheers.

[seibert]

What would the equivalent of pycc be for llvmlite? pycc (or rather, the API that superseded it) is for ahead of time compilation of Python functions. The frontend for translating Python functions is in Numba, so there isn't much functionality to bring back to llvmlite.

Are you looking for a way to produce shared libraries from the llvmlite API? pycc still requires a C compiler on the platform, so it isn't a self-contained linker.

[alendit]

Hi,

Are you looking for a way to produce shared libraries from the llvmlite API?

Exactly. Of course, you would rely on platforms linker to actually create the modules, but pycc takes care of a lot of things one would have to do manually otherwise, e.g. define python-specific module headers, expose or internalize functions, etc.