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

Turning the Source File into an Abstract Syntax Tree

As we learned in the previous chapter, a compiler is typically divided into two parts – the frontend and the backend. In this chapter, we will implement the frontend of a programming language – that is, the part that mainly deals with the source language. We will learn about the techniques that real-world compilers use and apply them to our programming languages.

Our journey will begin with us defining our programming language’s grammar and end with an abstract syntax tree (AST), which will become the base for code generation. You can use this approach for every programming language for which you would like to implement a compiler.

In this chapter, you will learn about the following:

  • Defining a real programming language, where you will learn about the tinylang language, which is a subset of a real programming language, and for which you will implement a compiler frontend
  • Organizing the directory...