Chapter 11: Gearing Up with Support Utilities
In the previous chapter, we learned the basics of Low-Level Virtual Machine (LLVM) intermediate representation (IR)—the target-independent intermediate representations in LLVM—and how to inspect and manipulate this with C++ application programming interfaces (APIs). These are the core techniques for doing program analysis and transformation in LLVM. In addition to those skill sets, LLVM also provides many support utilities to improve compiler developers' productivity when working with LLVM IR. We are going to cover those topics in this chapter.
A compiler is a complex piece of software. It not only needs to handle thousands of different cases— including input programs with different shapes and a wide variety of target architectures—but the correctness of a compiler is also an important topic: namely, the compiled code needs to have the same behavior as the original one. LLVM, a large-scale compiler framework...
