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

Adding an optimization pipeline to your compiler

The tinylang compiler we developed in the previous chapters performs no optimizations on the IR code. In the next few subsections, we’ll add an optimization pipeline to the compiler to achieve this accordingly.

Creating an optimization pipeline

The PassBuilder class is central to setting up the optimization pipeline. This class knows about all registered passes and can construct a pass pipeline from a textual description. We can use this class to either create the pass pipeline from a description given on the command line or use a default pipeline based on the requested optimization level. We also support the use of pass plugins, such as the ppprofiler pass plugin we discussed in the previous section. With this, we can mimic part of the functionality of the opt tool and also use similar names for the command-line options.

The PassBuilder class populates an instance of a ModulePassManager class, which is the pass manager...