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

Integrating a new target into the clang frontend

In the previous chapters, we developed the M88k target’s backend implementation within LLVM. To complete the compiler implementation for the M88k target, we will investigate connecting our new target to the frontend by adding a clang implementation for our M88k target.

Implementing the driver integration within clang

Let’s start by adding driver integration into clang for M88k:

  1. The first change we will be making is inside the clang/include/clang/Basic/TargetInfo.h file. The BuiltinVaListKind enum lists the different kinds of __builtin_va_list types for each target, which is used for variadic functions support, so a corresponding type for M88k is added:
    enum BuiltinVaListKind {
    . . .
        // typedef struct __va_list_tag {
        //    int __va_arg;
        //    int *__va_stk;
        //   ...