Summary

In this chapter, you learned how throwing and catching exceptions work in LLVM and the IR you can generate to exploit this feature. To enhance the scope of IR, you learned how you can attach various metadata to instructions. Metadata for type-based alias analysis provides additional information to the LLVM optimizer and helps with certain optimizations to produce better machine code. Users always appreciate the possibility of using a source-level debugger, and by adding debug information to the IR code, you can implement this important feature of a compiler.

Optimizing the IR code is the core task of LLVM. In the next chapter, we will learn how the pass manager works and how we can influence the optimization pipeline the pass manager governs.