llvm-hs - Haskell bindings for LLVM

This project aims to provide a relatively complete set of bindings for the LLVM API. If you find that anything is missing please open an issue! We generally try to stay close to the LLVM C++-API so you can consult the LLVM documentation and reuse existing resources.

Getting started

If you’ve worked with LLVM before, take a look at the examples in the llvm-hs-examples repo. If not, you can find a translation of the official LLVM tutorial at https://github.com/llvm-hs/llvm-hs-kaleidoscope. In general, we try to stay very close to the API and AST provided by LLVM itself, so the LLVM language reference is also very useful.

Contributing

We love all kinds of contributions so feel free to open issues for missing LLVM features, report & fix bugs or report API inconveniences.

Installing LLVM

Homebrew

Example using Homebrew on macOS:

$ brew install llvm-hs/llvm/llvm-8

Debian/Ubuntu

For Debian/Ubuntu based Linux distributions, the LLVM.org website provides binary distribution packages. Check apt.llvm.org for instructions for adding the correct package database for your OS version, and then:

$ apt-get install llvm-8-dev

Nix

Nix users can use the following commands to build the library:

$ nix-shell
$ cabal new-build llvm-hs

The Nix shell uses a pinned version of nixpkgs by default. You can define the nixpkgs argument to use a different nixpkgs tree:

$ nix-shell --arg nixpkgs '<nixpkgs>'

Building from source

Example of building LLVM from source. Detailed build instructions are available on the LLVM.org website here. CMake 3.4.3 and a recent C++ compiler are required, at least Clang 3.1, GCC 4.8, or Visual Studio 2015 (Update 3).

1. Download and unpack the LLVM-8.0 source code. We'll refer to the path the source tree was unpacked to as LLVM_SRC.

2. Create a temporary build directory and cd to it, for example:

   mkdir /tmp/build
   cd /tmp/build

3. Execute the following to configure the build. Here, INSTALL_PREFIX is where LLVM is to be installed, for example /usr/local:

   cmake $LLVM_SRC -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$INSTALL_PREFIX -DLLVM_BUILD_LLVM_DYLIB=True -DLLVM_LINK_LLVM_DYLIB=True

   See options and variables for a list of additional build parameters you can specify.

4. Build and install:

   cmake --build .
   cmake --build . --target install

5. For macOS only, some additional steps are useful to work around issues related to System Integrity Protection:

   cd $INSTALL_PREFIX/lib
   ln -s libLLVM.dylib libLLVM-8.dylib
   install_name_tool -id $PWD/libLTO.dylib libLTO.dylib
   install_name_tool -id $PWD/libLLVM.dylib libLLVM.dylib
   install_name_tool -change '@rpath/libLLVM.dylib' $PWD/libLLVM.dylib libLTO.dylib

Versioning

Trying to represent the version of LLVM in the version number but also allowing for version bumps in the bindings themselves while respecting the PVP can be tricky. Luckily LLVM is switching to a new versioning scheme of major.0.patch starting from version 4.0. This means that we can use the last two components for these bindings while the first component indicates the version of LLVM. A special case are the versions 3.major.minor that represent bindings to LLVM 3.9. Bindings to earlier versions are not provided.

How is this related to llvm-general?

This project is a fork of the venerable llvm-general that aims to improve the public release story, and better provide the interfaces needed for any Haskell project looking to leverage LLVM. Contributions are encouraged.

IRBuilder

A IRBuilder, starting out as a thin reinterpretation of the C++ IRBuilder inside of a Haskell State monad. Goal is to eliminate a lot of boilerplate around the most common uses of llvm-hs as a compiler backend.

Example LLVM module that adds two numbers:

; ModuleID = 'exampleModule'

define external ccc i32 @add(i32 %a, i32 %b){
entry:
  %0 = add i32 %a, %b
  ret i32 %0
}

{-# LANGUAGE OverloadedStrings #-}
{-# LANGUAGE RecursiveDo #-}

import Data.Text.Lazy.IO as T

import LLVM.Pretty  -- from the llvm-hs-pretty package
import LLVM.AST hiding (function)
import LLVM.AST.Type as AST
import qualified LLVM.AST.Float as F
import qualified LLVM.AST.Constant as C

import LLVM.IRBuilder.Module
import LLVM.IRBuilder.Monad
import LLVM.IRBuilder.Instruction

simple :: IO ()
simple = T.putStrLn $ ppllvm $ buildModule "exampleModule" $ mdo

  function "add" [(i32, "a"), (i32, "b")] i32 $ \[a, b] -> mdo

    entry <- block `named` "entry"; do
      c <- add a b
      ret c