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

Defining a real programming language

Real programming brings up more challenges than the simple calc language from the previous chapter. To have a look at the details, we will be using a tiny subset of Modula-2 in this and the following chapters. Modula-2 is well-designed and optionally supports generics and object-orientated programming (OOP). However, we are not going to create a complete Modula-2 compiler in this book. Therefore, we will call the subset tinylang.

Let’s begin with an example of what a program in tinylang looks like. The following function computes the greatest common divisor using the Euclidean algorithm:

MODULE Gcd;
PROCEDURE GCD(a, b: INTEGER) : INTEGER;
VAR t: INTEGER;
BEGIN
  IF b = 0 THEN
    RETURN a;
  END;
  WHILE b # 0 DO
    t := a MOD b;
    a := b;
    b := t;
  END;
  RETURN a;
END GCD;
END Gcd.

Now that we...