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

Learning Clang's subsystems and their roles

In this section, we will give you an overview of Clang's structures and organizations. We will briefly introduce some of the important components or subsystems, before using dedicated sections or chapters to expand them further in later parts of this book. We hope this will give you some idea of Clang's internals and how they will benefit your development.

First, let's look at the big picture. The following diagram shows the high-level structure of Clang:

Figure 5.1 – High-level structure of Clang

As explained in the legend, rectangles with rounded corners represent subsystems that might consist of multiple components with similar functionalities. For example, the frontend can be further dissected into components such as the preprocessor, parser, and code generation logic, to name a few. In addition, there are intermediate results, depicted as ovals in the preceding diagram. We are especially...