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

Using MIR to test and debug the backend

You saw in the previous section that many passes are run in the target backend. However, most of these passes do not operate on LLVM IR, but on MIR. This is a target-dependent representation of the instructions, and therefore more low-level than LLVM IR. It can still contain references to virtual registers, so it is not yet the pure instruction of the target CPU.

To see the optimizations on the IR level, you can, for example, tell llc to dump the IR after each pass. This does not work with the machine passes in the backend, because they do not work on IR. Instead, MIR serves a similar purpose.

MIR is a textual representation of the current state of the machine instructions in the current module. It utilizes the YAML format, which allows for serialization and deserialization. The basic idea is that you can stop the pass pipeline at a point and inspect the state in YAML format. You can also modify the YAML file, or create your own, and pass...