Book Image

LLVM Techniques, Tips, and Best Practices Clang and Middle-End Libraries

By : Min-Yih Hsu
Book Image

LLVM Techniques, Tips, and Best Practices Clang and Middle-End Libraries

By: Min-Yih Hsu

Overview of this book

Every programmer or engineer, at some point in their career, works with compilers to optimize their applications. Compilers convert a high-level programming language into low-level machine-executable code. LLVM provides the infrastructure, reusable libraries, and tools needed for developers to build their own compilers. With LLVM’s extensive set of tooling, you can effectively generate code for different backends as well as optimize them. In this book, you’ll explore the LLVM compiler infrastructure and understand how to use it to solve different problems. You’ll start by looking at the structure and design philosophy of important components of LLVM and gradually move on to using Clang libraries to build tools that help you analyze high-level source code. As you advance, the book will show you how to process LLVM IR – a powerful way to transform and optimize the source program for various purposes. Equipped with this knowledge, you’ll be able to leverage LLVM and Clang to create a wide range of useful programming language tools, including compilers, interpreters, IDEs, and source code analyzers. By the end of this LLVM book, you’ll have developed the skills to create powerful tools using the LLVM framework to overcome different real-world challenges.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Section 1: Build System and LLVM-Specific Tooling
6
Section 2: Frontend Development
11
Section 3: "Middle-End" Development

Summary

In this chapter, we started by introducing Clang's driver and the role of the toolchain – the module that provides platform-specific information such as the supported assemblers and linkers – that assisted it. Then, we showed you one of the most common ways to customize the driver – adding a new driver flag. After that, we talked about the toolchain and, most importantly, how to create a custom one. These skills are really useful when you want to create a new feature in Clang (or even LLVM) and need a custom compiler flag to enable it. Also, the ability to develop a custom toolchain is crucial for supporting Clang on new operating systems, or even new hardware architecture.

This is the final chapter of the second part of this book. Starting from the next chapter, we will talk about LLVM's middle end – the platform-independent program analysis and optimization framework.