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

Adapting a Pass for use with the old Pass manager

The future belongs to the new Pass manager, and it makes no sense to develop a new Pass for the old Pass manager exclusively. However, during the ongoing transition phase, it would be useful if a Pass could work with both Pass managers, as most of the Passes in LLVM already do.

The old Pass manager requires a Pass that has been derived from certain base classes. For example, a function Pass must derive from the FunctionPass base class. There are more differences, too. The method run by the Pass manager is named runOnFunction(), and an ID for the Pass must also be provided. The strategy we follow here is to create a separate class that we can use with the old Pass manager and refactor the source code in a way that the functionality can be used with both Pass managers.

We use the Pass plugin as a base. In the include/CountIR.h header file, we add a new class definition, as follows:

  1. The new class needs to derive from the...