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

Finding bugs with libFuzzer

To test your application, you’ll need to write unit tests. This is a great way to make sure your software behaves correctly and as you might expect. However, because of the exponential number of possible inputs, you’ll probably miss certain weird inputs, and a few bugs as well.

Fuzz testing can help here. The idea is to present your application with randomly generated data, or data based on valid input but with random changes. This is done repeatedly, so your application is tested with a large number of inputs, which is why fuzz testing can be a powerful testing approach. It has been noted that fuzz testing has assisted in finding hundreds of bugs within web browsers and other software.

Interestingly, LLVM comes with its own fuzz testing library. Originally part of the LLVM core libraries, the libFuzzer implementation was finally moved to compiler-rt. The library is designed to test small and fast functions.

Let’s run a small...