VCF West: LLVM-MOS: Modern C/C++ on the Venerable 6502 - Daniel Thornburgh

Video Description

LLVM-MOS is an LLVM project fork supporting the MOS Technology 6502. LLVM-MOS converts freestanding C/C++ into somewhat efficient 6502 machine code, despite the 6502’s hostility to the usual compiler techniques. This talk provides a lay exploration of how a modern compiler works, how one might hoodwink something as modern as LLVM into working with a 6502, and the general challenges of maintaining a compiler toolchain and SDK for the many many 6502 systems of historical note. We’ll also cover the work we’ve done upstream to help embedded development generally, and future plans to make LLVM-MOS even better. Daniel Thornburgh is a member of the LLVM toolchain team at Google that supports lower-level operating systems. His recent focus has been making LLD better for embedded development. In his spare time, Daniel maintains the out-of-tree LLVM fork LLVM-MOS, which targets the 8-bit MOS 6502. #vcfwest #vintagecomputerfestival #vintagecomputers #vintagecomputerfederation #vcfwest2025 #llvm-mos #6502 #mos6502