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

Technical requirements

In this section, we are also going to use LLVM Pass as the platform to show different API usages. Therefore, please make sure you have built the opt command-line tool, as follows:

$ ninja opt

Note that some of the content in this chapter only works with a debug build version of LLVM. Please check the first chapter, Chapter 1, Saving Resources When Building LLVM, for a recap on how to build LLVM in debug mode.

You can also go back to Chapter 9, Working with PassManager and AnalysisManager, if you are not sure how to create a new LLVM Pass.

The sample code for this chapter can be found here:

https://github.com/PacktPublishing/LLVM-Techniques-Tips-and-Best-Practices-Clang-and-Middle-End-Libraries/tree/main/Chapter11