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

At the time of writing this book, LLVM only has a few software requirements:

  • A C/C++ compiler that supports C++14
  • CMake
  • One of the build systems supported by CMake, such as GNU Make or Ninja
  • Python (2.7 is fine too, but I strongly recommend using 3.x)
  • zlib

The exact versions of these items change from time to time. Check out https://llvm.org/docs/GettingStarted.html#software for more details.

This chapter assumes you have built an LLVM before. If that's not the case, perform the following steps:

  1. Grab a copy of the LLVM source tree from GitHub:
    $ git clone https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project
  2. Usually, the default branch should build without errors. If you want to use release versions that are more stable, such as release version 10.x, use the following command:
    $ git clone -b release/10.x https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project
  3. Finally, you should create a build folder where you're going to invoke the CMake command. All the building artifacts will also be placed inside this folder. This can be done using the following command:
    $ mkdir .my_build
    $ cd .my_build