Will Schmidt
Senior Software Engineer at IBM
Rochester, Minnesota, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolWill Schmidt is a senior software engineer with 26 years of deep toolchain and low-level systems expertise, currently at IBM and based in Rochester, MN. He specializes in compiler back-ends and architecture enablement—particularly PowerPC—having contributed to GCC, LLVM/Clang, Valgrind, and performance tooling such as Perfmon/libPFM. His career spans Linux kernel bring-up, real-time Glibc and toolchain work for x86 and PowerPC, and early thin-client and firmware interface development, reflecting rare end-to-end experience from firmware to compilers. Notably, he introduced Power8 and ELFv2-related updates in Clang and refactored RS6000/PowerPC built-ins in GCC, improving ABI and vector handling across toolchains. Colleagues rely on him for pragmatic systems fixes and architecture enablement that bridge hardware details and production toolchains.
26 years of coding experience
28 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelors, Computer Science, Mathematics, Bachelors, Computer Science, Mathematics at Bemidji State University
Github Skills (18)
powerpc10
c-language10
back-end-development10
architecture10
computer-architecture10
compiler-development10
c1110
gcc10
c1710
compiler-compiler10
linker10
assembler10
compiler10
cprogramming-language10
architectures10
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
gcc-mirror/gcc
Mar 2020 - Sep 2020
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Systems Engineer
Back-end Developer & Systems EngineerContributions:8 commits in 5 months
Contributions summary:Will's contributions primarily involve modifying the GCC compiler's configuration and built-in functions, specifically for the rs6000 architecture. They refactored and improved handling for PowerPC64 built-in functions and VSX load/store operations. Furthermore, the user addressed parameter validation issues within the vector floating-point conversion built-ins. The user also removed unused code and refactored build system options, contributing to overall code maintainability and efficiency.
llvm-mirror/clang
Mar 2014 - Jun 2014
Mirror kept for legacy. Moved to https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:6 commits in 3 months
Contributions summary:Will primarily contributed to the Clang compiler's back-end, focusing on the PowerPC (PPC64LE) architecture. Their work involved updating data layout descriptions, assembler/linker parameters, and introducing a macro for the ELFv2 ABI. The user also added support for the Power8 CPU and included test cases to validate the changes. These modifications improve the compiler's ability to generate code for specific PowerPC targets.
keptwindowsllvmcc-plus-plus
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.