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

Generating assembler instructions

The instruction selection implemented in the previous sections lowers the IR instructions into MachineInstr instances. This is already a much lower representation of instruction, but it is not yet the machine code itself. The last pass in the backend pipeline is to emit the instructions, either as assembly text or into an object file. The M88kAsmPrinter machine pass is responsible for this task.

Basically, this pass lowers a MachineInstr instance to an MCInst instance, which is then emitted to a streamer. The MCInst class represents the real machine code instruction. This additional lowering is required because the MachineInstr class still does not have all the required details.

For the first approach, we can limit our implementation to overriding the emitInstruction() method. You need to override more methods for supporting several operand types, mainly to emit the correct relocations. This class is also responsible for handling inline assemblers...