A Complete Guide to LLVM for Programming Language Creators

Re:A Complete Guide to LLVM for Programming Language Creators by mhh__ on Friday December 25, 2020 @08:38PM (#25540637)

I would avoid any text, but LLVM has mature bindings in ocaml and Haskell, for example. The textual representation isn't stable IIRC, and it adds a step in between you and your already lumbering backend.

Ultimately the C++ API isn't too difficult to use but LLVM mandates a fairly hardcore level of C++ knowledge to play with it's internals.

Quick Tip: if you're thinking "Holy shit how do I get from [complicated] all the way down to IR instructions" lower the big thing to a something simpler so you can reuse the code to generate IR from that - for example, a foreach loop is expressible as a for loop under the hood, now you only have to be compile for loops. This would usually be done in the AST itself.

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Re:A Complete Guide to LLVM for Programming Language Creators by ritter2a on Saturday December 26, 2020 @05:21AM (#25542529)

Regarding interface stability: Indeed, the textual representation is not stable, things like added types in the representation of some instructions can happen when upgrading to a new version. However, to be entirely honest, in the last few years of updating LLVM-based research tools to newer LLVM versions, changes in the C++ API that required me to (sometimes just slightly) change my code happened a lot more often than changes in the textual representation...

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