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LLVM Techniques, Tips, and Best Practices Clang and Middle-End Libraries

LLVM Techniques, Tips, and Best Practices Clang and Middle-End Libraries

By : Min-Yih Hsu
5 (7)
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LLVM Techniques, Tips, and Best Practices Clang and Middle-End Libraries

LLVM Techniques, Tips, and Best Practices Clang and Middle-End Libraries

5 (7)
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)
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1
Section 1: Build System and LLVM-Specific Tooling
6
Section 2: Frontend Development
11
Section 3: "Middle-End" Development

Exploring Clang's tooling features and extension options

The Clang project contains not just the clang executable. It also provides interfaces for developers to extend its tools, as well as to export its functionalities as libraries. In this section, we will give you an overview of all these options. Some of them will be covered in later chapters.

There are currently three kinds of tooling and extension options available in Clang: Clang plugins, libTooling, and Clang Tools. To explain their differences and provide more background knowledge when we talk about Clang extensions, we need to start from an important data type first: the clang::FrontendAction class.

The FrontendAction class

In the Learning Clang's subsystems and their roles section, we went through a variety of Clang's frontend components, such as the preprocessor and Sema, to name a few. Many of these important components are encapsulated by a single data type, called FrontendAction. A FrontendAction...

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