Book Image

Learn LLVM 17 - Second Edition

By : Kai Nacke, Amy Kwan
Book Image

Learn LLVM 17 - Second Edition

By: Kai Nacke, Amy Kwan

Overview of this book

LLVM was built to bridge the gap between the theoretical knowledge found in compiler textbooks and the practical demands of compiler development. With a modular codebase and advanced tools, LLVM empowers developers to build compilers with ease. This book serves as a practical introduction to LLVM, guiding you progressively through complex scenarios and ensuring that you navigate the challenges of building and working with compilers like a pro. The book starts by showing you how to configure, build, and install LLVM libraries, tools, and external projects. You’ll then be introduced to LLVM's design, unraveling its applications in each compiler stage: frontend, optimizer, and backend. Using a real programming language subset, you'll build a frontend, generate LLVM IR, optimize it through the pipeline, and generate machine code. Advanced chapters extend your expertise, covering topics such as extending LLVM with a new pass, using LLVM tools for debugging, and enhancing the quality of your code. You'll also focus on just-in-time compilation issues and the current state of JIT-compilation support with LLVM. Finally, you’ll develop a new backend for LLVM, gaining insights into target description and how instruction selection works. By the end of this book, you'll have hands-on experience with the LLVM compiler development framework through real-world examples and source code snippets.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
1
Part 1: The Basics of Compiler Construction with LLVM
4
Part 2: From Source to Machine Code Generation
10
Part 3: Taking LLVM to the Next Level
14
Part 4: Roll Your Own Backend

Generating C++ code from a TableGen file

In the previous section, you defined records in the TableGen language. To make use of those records, you need to write your own TableGen backend that can produce C++ source code or do other things using the records as input.

In Chapter 3, Turning the Source File into an Abstract Syntax Tree, the implementation of the Lexer class uses a database file to define tokens and keywords. Various query functions make use of that database file. Besides that, the database file is used to implement a keyword filter. The keyword filter is a hash map, implemented using the llvm::StringMap class. Whenever an identifier is found, the keyword filter is called to find out if the identifier is actually a keyword. If you take a closer look at the implementation using the ppprofiler pass from Chapter 6, Advanced IR Generation, then you will see that this function is called quite often. Therefore, it may be useful to experiment with different implementations to...