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

An arithmetic expression language

Arithmetic expressions are part of every programming language. Here is an example of an arithmetic expression calculation language called calc. calc expressions are compiled into an application that evaluates the following expression:

with a, b: a * (4 + b)

The variables that are used in the expression must be declared with the with keyword. This program is compiled into an application, which asks the user for the values of the a and b variables and prints the result.

Examples are always welcome but as a compiler writer, you need a more thorough specification than this for implementation and testing. The vehicle for the syntax of the programming language is its grammar.

Formalism for specifying the syntax of a programming language

The elements of a language, such as its keywords, identifiers, strings, numbers, and operators, are called tokens. In this sense, a program is a sequence of tokens, and the grammar specifies which sequences...