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

Instrumenting an application with sanitizers

LLVM comes with a couple of sanitizers. These are passes that instrument the intermediate representation (IR) to check for certain misbehavior of an application. Usually, they require library support, which is part of the compiler-rt project. The sanitizers can be enabled in clang, which makes them very comfortable to use. To build the compiler-rt project, we can simply add the -DLLVM_ENABLE_RUNTIMES=compiler-rt CMake variable to the initial CMake configuration step when building LLVM.

In the following sections, we will look at the address, memory, and thread sanitizers. First, we’ll look at the address sanitizer.

Detecting memory access problems with the address sanitizer

You can use the address sanitizer to detect different types of memory access bugs within an application. This includes common errors such as using dynamically allocated memory after freeing it or writing to dynamically allocated memory outside the boundaries...