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

Debugging Using LLVM Tools

LLVM comes with a set of tools that helps you identify certain errors in your application. All these tools make use of the LLVM and clang libraries.

In this chapter, you will learn how to instrument an application with sanitizers, as well as how to use the most common sanitizer to identify a wide range of bugs, after which you’ll implement fuzz testing for your application. This will help you identify bugs that are usually not found with unit testing. You will also learn how to identify performance bottlenecks in your application, run the static analyzer to identify problems normally not found by the compiler, and create your own clang-based tool, in which you can extend clang with new functionality.

This chapter will cover the following topics:

  • Instrumenting an application with sanitizers
  • Finding bugs with libFuzzer
  • Performance profiling with XRay
  • Checking the source with the Clang Static Analyzer
  • Creating your own clang...