You're reading from LLVM Code Generation A deep dive into compiler backend development

Product type Paperback

Published in May 2025

Publisher Packt

ISBN-13 9781837637782

Length 608 pages

Edition 1st Edition

Languages

C++

Tools

LLVM

Concepts

Programming Language

Author (1):

Quentin Colombet

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Table of Contents (29) Chapters

Preface

1. Getting Started with LLVM

2. Building LLVM and Understanding the Directory Structure FREE CHAPTER

3. Contributing to LLVM

4. Compiler Basics and How They Map to LLVM APIs

5. Writing Your First Optimization

6. Dealing with Pass Managers

7. TableGen – LLVM Swiss Army Knife for Modeling

8. Middle-End: LLVM IR to LLVM IR

9. Understanding LLVM IR

10. Survey of the Existing Passes

11. Introducing Target-Specific Constructs

12. Hands-On Debugging LLVM IR Passes

13. Introduction to the Backend

14. Getting Started with the Backend

15. Getting Started with the Machine Code Layer

16. The Machine Pass Pipeline

17. LLVM IR to Machine IR

18. Getting Started with Instruction Selection

19. Instruction Selection: The IR Building Phase

20. Instruction Selection: The Legalization Phase

21. Instruction Selection: The Selection Phase and Beyond

22. Final Lowering and Optimizations

23. Instruction Scheduling

24. Register Allocation

25. Lowering of the Stack Layout

26. Getting Started with the Assembler

27. Other Books You May Enjoy

28. Index

Technical requirements

Building an LLVM backend implies developing directly in the LLVM code base (or a fork of it). As such, you will need all the same tools that we already presented in Chapter 1.

Additionally, for all the snippets presented in this chapter, you will find the actual implementation in the https://github.com/PacktPublishing/LLVM-Code-Generation-by-example GitHub repository. We’ll call this repository the companion repository for the remainder of the chapter.

The changes for this chapter are all included between the begin_ch14 and end_ch14 Git tags of the companion repository. If you are not familiar with Git tags, look at Chapter 9 for a quick explanation of what you can do with them. Throughout the chapter, we also mention specific tags that we created in this repository for you to easily find the relevant commits.

Note that the code changes made for Chapter 14 to Chapter 17 are intertwined. The begin_XXX and end_XXX tags encompass the first and...