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

Creating your own project using LLVM libraries

Based on the information in the previous section, you can now create your own project using LLVM libraries. The following sections introduce a small language called Tiny. The project will be called tinylang. Here the structure for such a project is defined. Even though the tool in this section is only a Hello, world application, its structure has all the parts required for a real-world compiler.

Creating the directory structure

The first question is if the tinylang project should be built together with LLVM (like clang), or if it should be a standalone project that just uses the LLVM libraries. In the former case, it is also necessary to decide where to create the project.

Let's first assume that tinylang should be built together with LLVM. There are different options for where to place the project. The first solution is to create a subdirectory for the project inside the llvm-projects directory. All projects in this directory...