Hi,
Loving toying around with my just-arrived HiFive1, just a random question.
Is it reasonable to want to use LLVM instead of GCC to compile code? I see that lowrisc.org has invested a lot of effort into giving LLVM a RISCV backend so it might be simple enough?
It’s simply a matter of compiling a binary and then uploading it to the HiFive’s flash at the correct memory offset?
My reasoning is that i’d like to experiment with some more interesting modern languages than C/C++, such as eg Rust etc.
Just asking because i dont want to bite off more than i can chew as a reasonably competent but not miracle-working developer.
Cheers 
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It’s a reasonable thing, although gcc works perfectly well.
The official llvm repository has had pretty good support for 32 bit RISC-V for most of this year. 64 bit support has only started to be upstreamed recently, but that doesn’t concern the HiFive1.
Clang/LLVM for RISC-V uses the gcc headers and gnu linker.
It should work no problem, but it’s not extensively tested and our build scripts assume everyone uses gcc
And, yes, the main thing is to use a linker script that puts the code (at least something) at 0x2040000 in the flash, and runs a reasonable assembly language init entry point that sets up oscillators and so forth. Definitely easiest to just use our one for that.
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Thanks a lot, i might still give it a try. I’d really love to see if i can get something nontrivial running on it written in Swift or Rust.
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