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 8: Optimizing IR

LLVM uses a series of Passes to optimize the intermediate representation (IR). A Pass performs an operation on a unit of IR, either a function or a module. The operation can be a transformation, which changes the IR in a defined way, or an analysis, which collects information such as dependencies. A series of Passes is called the Pass pipeline. The Pass manager executes the Pass pipeline on the IR that our compiler produces. Therefore, it is important that we know what the Pass manager does and how to construct a Pass pipeline. The semantics of a programming language might require the development of new Passes, and we must add these Passes to the pipeline.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Introducing the LLVM Pass manager
  • Implementing a Pass using the new Pass manager
  • Adapting a Pass for use with the old Pass manager
  • Adding an optimization pipeline to your compiler

By the end of the chapter, you will know how...