Book Image

LLVM Essentials

By : Mayur Pandey, Suyog Sarda, David Farago
Book Image

LLVM Essentials

By: Mayur Pandey, Suyog Sarda, David Farago

Overview of this book

LLVM is currently the point of interest for many firms, and has a very active open source community. It provides us with a compiler infrastructure that can be used to write a compiler for a language. It provides us with a set of reusable libraries that can be used to optimize code, and a target-independent code generator to generate code for different backends. It also provides us with a lot of other utility tools that can be easily integrated into compiler projects. This book details how you can use the LLVM compiler infrastructure libraries effectively, and will enable you to design your own custom compiler with LLVM in a snap. We start with the basics, where you’ll get to know all about LLVM. We then cover how you can use LLVM library calls to emit intermediate representation (IR) of simple and complex high-level language paradigms. Moving on, we show you how to implement optimizations at different levels, write an optimization pass, generate code that is independent of a target, and then map the code generated to a backend. The book also walks you through CLANG, IR to IR transformations, advanced IR block transformations, and target machines. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to easily utilize the LLVM libraries in your own projects.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
LLVM Essentials
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Chapter 6. IR to Selection DAG phase

Until the previous chapter, we saw how a frontend language can be converted to LLVM IR. We also saw how IR can be transformed into more optimized code. After a series of analysis and transformation passes, the final IR is the most optimized machine independent code. However, the IR is still an abstract representation of the actual machine code. The compiler has to generate target architecture code for execution.

LLVM uses DAG—a directed acyclic graph representation for code generation. The idea is to convert IR into a SelectionDAG and then go over a series of phases—DAG combine, legalization, instruction selection, instruction scheduling, etc—to finally allocate registers and emit machine code. Note that register allocation and instruction scheduling take place in an intertwined manner.

We are going to cover following topics in this chapter:

  • Converting IR to selectionDAG

  • Legalizing selectionDAG

  • Optimizing selectionDAG

  • Instruction selection

  • Scheduling and emitting...