The return of the Shark

[Roman Kennke]

Hi there,

the last couple of days I worked on getting Shark back into shape for
OpenJDK8. I have it working now with LLVM 3.1 and latest OpenJDK8
hsx/hotspot-comp now, it successfully runs Eclipse and a bunch of other
apps I tried.

I have one question to which I'd like to hear other people's input. In
the Shark code we have several #ifdefs that check for specific LLVM
versions like this:

+#if SHARK_LLVM_VERSION >= 30

For LLVM 3.1 I'd need to add more to this. However, I fear this will be
an increasingly difficult thing to do, and would actually prefer to get
rid of those check altogether and only support whatever is the latest
LLVM release (or at least, some specific known LLVM release). Even now
it's difficult for me to say which code is generic or specific to an
LLVM version, and I don't think we can possibly expect to test against
all those LLVM versions. And it also clutters the code unnecessarily. 

So I guess my question is, would it be ok for everybody to simply drop
this version check, and support latest LLVM only (3.1 as of now).? Or is
there a need for specific LLVM version support, and if yes, then which
versions are they (maybe we can then at least limit the number of
versions we have).

What do you think?

Roman