Preface

Constructing a compiler is a complex and fascinating task. The LLVM project provides reusable components for your compiler and the LLVM core libraries implement a world-class optimizing code generator, which translates a source language-independent intermediate representation of machine code for all popular CPU architectures. The compilers for many programming languages already take advantage of LLVM technology.

This book teaches you how to implement your own compiler and how to use LLVM to achieve it. You will learn how the frontend of a compiler turns source code into an abstract syntax tree, and how to generate Intermediate Representation (IR) from it. Furthermore, you will also explore adding an optimization pipeline to your compiler, which allows you to compile the IR to performant machine code.

The LLVM framework can be extended in several ways, and you will learn how to add new passes, and even a completely new backend to LLVM. Advanced topics such as compiling for a different CPU architecture and extending clang and the clang static analyzer with your own plugins and checkers are also covered. This book follows a practical approach and is packed with example source code, which makes it easy to apply the gained knowledge within your own projects.