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

Chapter 1: Installing LLVM

To learn how to work with LLVM, it is best to begin by compiling LLVM from the source. LLVM is an umbrella project, and its GitHub repository contains the sources for all the projects that belong to LLVM. Each LLVM project is in a top-level directory of the repository. Besides cloning the repository, your system must also have all tools that are required by the build system installed.

In this chapter, you will learn about the following topics:

  • Getting the prerequisites ready, which will show you how to set up your build system.
  • Building with CMake, which will cover how to compile and install the LLVM core libraries and Clang with CMake and Ninja.
  • Customizing the build process, which will talk about the various way we can influence the build process.