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

LLVM’s overall JIT implementation and use cases

So far, we have only looked at ahead-of-time (AOT) compilers. These compilers compile the whole application. The application can only run after the compilation is finished. If the compilation is performed at the runtime of the application, then the compiler is a JIT compiler. A JIT compiler has interesting use cases:

  • Implementation of a virtual machine: A programming language can be translated to byte code with an AOT compiler. At runtime, a JIT compiler is used to compile the byte code to machine code. The advantage of this approach is that the byte code is hardware-independent, and thanks to the JIT compiler, there is no performance penalty compared to an AOT compiler. Java and C# use this model today, but this is not a new idea: the USCD Pascal compiler from 1977 already used a similar approach.
  • Expression evaluation: A spreadsheet application can compile often-executed expressions with a JIT compiler. For example...