Looks like the LLVM folks are (finally) starting to get serious about making (fast) precise GC possible [1]? Back when I was (struggling at) working on Rust's GC this was by far the biggest hurdle [2]. Good to see they're getting around to fixing this.

[1]: http://llvm.org/docs/Statepoints.html

[2]: https://github.com/elliottslaughter/rust-gc-talk

Most specifically Azul folks who are contributing to the project: http://www.philipreames.com/Blog/

(Azul Systems does a very concurrent Hotspot based JVM called Zing as well as certified and supported OpenJDK releases.)

If you want to keep up to date on developments in LLVM, Clang and related projects between releases, you may be interested in my LLVM Weekly newsletter http://llvmweekly.org/

Clang docs & release notes: http://llvm.org/releases/3.6.0/tools/clang/docs/ (these are a bit hard to find)

Are there any recurring gcc vs llvm (and vs icc) benchmarks to see how they are evolving over time? Something like benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org would be nice.

There are some good SPEC numbers on GCC and LLVM here:

https://vmakarov.fedorapeople.org/spec/

The latest runs are GCC 4.9 and LLVM 3.4:

https://vmakarov.fedorapeople.org/spec/2014/2014.html

Phoronix have a section on compiler news [1]. They do comparisons between compilers, such as llvm vs gcc [2].

I would imagine that with the release of llvm there will be a comparison with gcc5 in the near future.

[1] http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_topic&q=Compiler [2] http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTgzMzQ

You may be able to find what you want by digging through these benchmarks: http://openbenchmarking.org/results/featured/Compiler

It is kind of difficult to find benchmarks that were run on the same setup over time.

does anyone know what this means?

    Python 2.7 is now required
    This was done to simplify compatibility with python 3.

I'm assuming they allowed <2.7 Python before, which are less compatible with 3.