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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

Chapter 6: Extending the Preprocessor

In the previous chapter, we went through the structure of Clang—the official frontend of Low-Level Virtual Machine (LLVM) for C-family languages—and some of its most important components. We also introduced a variety of Clang's tooling and extension options. In this chapter, we're diving into the first phase in Clang's frontend pipeline: the preprocessor.

For C-family programming languages, preprocessing is an early compilation phase that replaces any directive starting with a hash (#) character—#include and #define, to name but a few—with some other textual contents (or non-textual tokens, in some rare cases). For example, the preprocessor will basically copy and paste contents of header files designated by the #include directive into the current compilation unit before parsing it. This technique has the advantage of extracting common code and reusing it.

In this chapter, we will briefly explain...

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