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  • Book Overview & Buying Learn LLVM 17
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Learn LLVM 17

Learn LLVM 17 - Second Edition

By : Kai Nacke, Amy Kwan
4.3 (8)
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Learn LLVM 17

Learn LLVM 17

4.3 (8)
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)
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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

Adding debug metadata

To allow source-level debugging, we have to add debug information. Support for debug information in LLVM uses debug metadata to describe the types of the source language and other static information, and intrinsics to track variable values. The LLVM core libraries generate debug information in the DWARF format on Unix systems and in PDB format for Windows. We’ll look at the general structure in the next section.

Understanding the general structure of debug metadata

To describe the general structure, LLVM uses metadata similar to the metadata for type-based analysis. The static structure describes the file, the compilation unit, functions and lexical blocks, and the used data types.

The main class we use is llvm::DIBuilder, and we need to use the llvm/IR/DIBuilder header file to get the class declaration. This builder class provides an easy-to-use interface to create the debug metadata. Later, the metadata is either added to LLVM objects such as...

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Learn LLVM 17
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