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

Working with arrays, structs, and pointers

For almost all applications, basic types such as INTEGER are not sufficient. For example, to represent mathematical objects such as a matrix or a complex number, you must construct new data types based on existing data types. These new data types are generally called aggregate or composite types.

Arrays are a sequence of elements of the same type. In LLVM, arrays are always static: the number of elements is constant. The tinylang type of ARRAY [10] OF INTEGER, or the C type of long[10], is expressed in IR as follows:

[10 x i64]

Structures are composites of different types. In programming languages, they are often expressed with named members. For example, in tinylang, a structure is written as RECORD x, y: REAL; color: INTEGER; END; and the same structure in C is struct { float x, y; long color; };. In LLVM IR, only the type names are listed:

{ float, float, i64 }

To access a member, a numerical index is used. Like arrays,...