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

Syntactical analysis

The syntactical analysis is done by the parser, which we will implement next. The base of this is the grammar and the lexer from the previous sections. The result of the parsing process is a dynamic data structure called an abstract syntax tree (AST). The AST is a very condensed representation of the input and is well-suited for semantic analysis.

First, we will implement the parser, and after that, we will have a look at the parsing process within the AST.

A hand-written parser

The interface of the parser is defined in the header file, Parser.h. It begins with some include declarations:

#ifndef PARSER_H
#define PARSER_H
#include "AST.h"
#include "Lexer.h"
#include "llvm/Support/raw_ostream.h"

The AST.h header file declares the interface for the AST and is shown later. The coding guidelines from LLVM forbid the use of the <iostream> library, therefore, the header of the equivalent LLVM functionality is included...