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 11: Gearing Up with Support Utilities

In the previous chapter, we learned the basics of Low-Level Virtual Machine (LLVM) intermediate representation (IR)—the target-independent intermediate representations in LLVM—and how to inspect and manipulate this with C++ application programming interfaces (APIs). These are the core techniques for doing program analysis and transformation in LLVM. In addition to those skill sets, LLVM also provides many support utilities to improve compiler developers' productivity when working with LLVM IR. We are going to cover those topics in this chapter.

A compiler is a complex piece of software. It not only needs to handle thousands of different cases— including input programs with different shapes and a wide variety of target architectures—but the correctness of a compiler is also an important topic: namely, the compiled code needs to have the same behavior as the original one. LLVM, a large-scale compiler framework...