Book Image

Learn LLVM 12

By : Kai Nacke
Book Image

Learn LLVM 12

By: Kai Nacke

Overview of this book

LLVM was built to bridge the gap between compiler textbooks and actual compiler development. It provides a modular codebase and advanced tools which help developers to build compilers easily. This book provides a practical introduction to LLVM, gradually helping you navigate through complex scenarios with ease when it comes to building and working with compilers. You’ll start by configuring, building, and installing LLVM libraries, tools, and external projects. Next, the book will introduce you to LLVM design and how it works in practice during each LLVM compiler stage: frontend, optimizer, and backend. Using a subset of a real programming language as an example, you will then learn how to develop a frontend and generate LLVM IR, hand it over to the optimization pipeline, and generate machine code from it. Later chapters will show you how to extend LLVM with a new pass and how instruction selection in LLVM works. You’ll also focus on Just-in-Time compilation issues and the current state of JIT-compilation support that LLVM provides, before finally going on to understand how to develop a new backend for LLVM. By the end of this LLVM book, you will have gained real-world experience in working with the LLVM compiler development framework with the help of hands-on examples and source code snippets.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Section 1 – The Basics of Compiler Construction with LLVM
5
Section 2 – From Source to Machine Code Generation
11
Section 3 –Taking LLVM to the Next Level

Syntactical analysis

Syntactical analysis is done by the parser, which we will implement next. Its base is the grammar and the lexer from the previous sections. The result of the parsing process is a dynamic data structure called an abstract syntax tree (AST). The AST is a very condensed representation of the input and is well-suited for semantic analysis. First, we will implement the parser. After that, we will have a look at the AST.

A handwritten parser

The interface of the parser is defined in the Parser.h header file. It begins with some include statements:

#ifndef PARSER_H
#define PARSER_H
#include "AST.h"
#include "Lexer.h"
#include "llvm/Support/raw_ostream.h"

The AST.h header file declares the interface for the AST and will be shown later. The coding guidelines from LLVM forbid the use of the <iostream> library, so the header of the equivalent LLVM functionality must be included. It is required to emit an error message. Let&apos...