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

Setting the stage for a new backend

Whether it's needed commercially to support a new CPU or it's only for a hobby project to add support for some old architecture, adding a new backend to LLVM is a major task. The following sections outline what you need to develop a new backend. We will add a backend for the Motorola M88k architecture, which is a RISC architecture from the 1980s.

References

You can read more about the architecture on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_88000. The important information about this architecture is still available on the internet. You can find the CPU manuals with the instruction set and timing information at http://www.bitsavers.org/components/motorola/88000/, and the System V ABI M88k Processor supplement with the definitions of the ELF format and the calling convention can be found at https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_attunixSysa0138776555SystemVRelease488000ABI1990_8011463.

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