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

Chapter 9: Working with PassManager and AnalysisManager

In the previous section of this book, Frontend Development, we began with an introduction to the internals of Clang, which is LLVM's official frontend for the C family of programming languages. We went through various projects, involving skills and knowledge, that can help you to deal with problems that are tightly coupled with source code.

In this part of the book, we will be working with LLVM IR – a target-independent intermediate representation (IR) for compiler optimization and code generation. Compared to Clang's Abstract Syntax Tree (AST), LLVM IR provides a different level of abstraction by encapsulating extra execution details to enable more powerful program analyses and transformations. In addition to the design of LLVM IR, there is a mature ecosystem around this IR format, which provides countless resources, such as libraries, tools, and algorithm implementations. We will cover a variety of topics...