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

Summary

In this chapter, you learned how to translate aggregate data types and pointers to LLVM IR code. You also learned about the intricacies of the ABI. Finally, you learned about the different approaches to translating classes and virtual functions to LLVM IR. With the knowledge of this chapter, you will be able to create an LLVM IR code generator for most real programming languages.

In the next chapter, you will learn about some advanced techniques. Exception handling is fairly common in modern programming languages, and LLVM has some support for it. Attaching type information to pointers can help with certain optimizations, so we will add this, too. Last but not least, the ability to debug an application is essential for many developers, so we will add the generation of debug metadata to our code generator.