spth / llvm-cbe

resurrected LLVM "C Backend", with improvements

llvm-cbe

resurrected LLVM "C Backend", with improvements

INSTALLATION INSTRUCTIONS

This version of the LLVM-CBE library works with LLVM 3.7. You will have to compile this version of LLVM before you try to use LLVM-CBE. This guide will walk you through the compilation and installation of both tools and show usage statements to verify that the LLVM-CBE library is compiled correctly.

The library is known to compile on various Linux versions (Redhat, Mageia, Ubuntu, Debian), Mac OS X, and Windows (Mingw-w64).

Step 1: Installing LLVM

LLVM-CBE relies on specific LLVM internals, and so it is best to use it with a specific revision of the LLVM development tree. Currently, llvm-cbe works with the LLVM 3.7 release versions and autotools.

Note: to convert C to LLVM IR to run the tests, you will also need a C compiler such as clang.

The first step is to compile LLVM on your machine (this assumes an in-tree build, but out-of-tree will also work):

 cd $HOME
 git clone https://github.com/llvm-mirror/llvm
 cd llvm
 git checkout release_37
 ./configure
 make

Step 2: Compiling LLVM-CBE

Next, download and compile llvm-cbe from the same folder:

cd $HOME/llvm/projects
git clone https://github.com/JuliaComputing/llvm-cbe.git llvm-cbe
cd ..
make

Step 3: Usage Examples

If llvm-cbe compiles, you should be able to run it with the following commands.

$ cd llvm/lib/test/selectionsort
$ ls
main.c
$ clang -S -emit-llvm main.c
$ ls
main.c main.ll
$ $(HOME)/llvm/Release/bin/llvm-cbe main.ll

Compile Generated C-Code and Run

$ gcc -o main.cbe main.cbe.c
$ ls
main.c  main.cbe  main.cbe.c  main.ll
$ ./main.cbe