LLVM Cookbook

Chapter 2. Steps in Writing a Frontend

In this chapter, we will cover the following recipes:

• Defining a TOY language
• Implementing a lexer
• Defining Abstract Syntax Tree
• Implementing a parser
• Parsing simple expressions
• Parsing binary expressions
• Invoking a driver for parsing
• Running lexer and parser on our TOY language
• Defining IR code generation methods for each AST class
• Generating IR code for expressions
• Generating IR code for functions
• Adding IR optimization support

Introduction

In this chapter, you will get to know about how to write a frontend for a language. By making use of a custom-defined TOY language, you will have recipes on how to write a lexer and a parser, and how to generate IR code from the Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) generated by the frontend. ...