Imagesource: https://www.linuxadictos.com/

The biggest 8-bit news of the week so far and unlikely to be topped. Daniel Thornburgh and a couple of friends have released version 0.1.0 of their LLVM backend for the MOS6502: llvm-mos.

Finally you can write C++ code, compile it using Clang, link it against a very small standard library providing printf, malloc & free as well as exit.

If that does not tell you anything ... don't worry. 😥

Due to the unfortunately somewhat limited address space of all 6502 based architectures, the project won't blow the retro world out of the water. But completely independent of that, it is an absolutely remarkable achievement! 

Why? Because the thing is complete. Besides the LLVM backend itself, you get the standard POSIX tools, a GAS-compatible assembler, a linker ... you could almost say every 6502 lover's wet dream. Scrap the almost.

We are more than curious about the first real experiments with the toolchain. Awesome project!