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 learned how to write an LLVM Pass for the new PassManager and how to use program analysis data within a Pass via the AnalysisManager. We also learned how to leverage various instrumentation tools to improve the development experiences while working with the Pass pipeline. With the skills gained from this chapter, you can now write a Pass to process LLVM IR, which can be used to transform or even optimize a program.

These topics are some of the most fundamental and crucial skills to learn before starting on any IR level transformation or analysis task. If you have been working with the legacy PassManager, these skills can also help you to migrate your code to the new PassManager system, which has now been enabled by default.

In the next chapter, we will show you various tips along with the best practices that you should know when using the APIs of LLVM IR.