Gen IR 🧞‍♂️

Generate LLVM IR from an Xcode Build Log

This tool was heavily inspired by a DigitalRickshaw blog post ❤️

Prerequisites

To build the tool, you'll need Xcode 14 and macOS 12.5 or greater.

To install and run the tool, you'll need Homebrew, Xcode, and macOS 12 or greater.

Install

# If you don't have brew installed, install it: https://brew.sh/

# Add the brew tap to your local machine
brew tap veracode/tap

# Install the tool
brew install gen-ir

Update (if previously installed)

brew upgrade gen-ir

🎉 Done

All installed! You can now use gen-ir on your system - be sure to run gen-ir --help to check the available commands and options.

Usage

⚠️ Before you use

It's important to know that gen-ir requires that a full build log is provided.

This means a clean, fresh build of a project.

The compiler will not make a call for an object that doesn't need to be rebuilt, and we will not be able to parse what doesn't exist. Ensure you do a clean before your build otherwise gen-ir may miss some modules.

Due to a bug in Xcode you must run the clean and archive commands separately. This means you need to do a xcodebuild clean and then an xcodebuild archive and not xcodebuild clean archive.

gen-ir takes a Xcode build log by two means, a path to a file or stdin:

# Path to build log (you can export from inside of Xcode too)
xcodebuild clean && \
xcodebuild archive -project TestProject.xcodeproj -scheme TestProject -configuration Debug -destination generic/platform=iOS -archivePath TestProject.xcarchive > build_log.txt

gen-ir build_log.txt TestProject.xcarchive

# Stdin (you may need to redirect stderr to stdout here, Xcode is weird about writing to it sometimes)
xcodebuild clean && \
xcodebuild archive -project TestProject.xcodeproj -scheme TestProject -configuration Debug -destination generic/platform=iOS -archivePath TestProject.xcarchive | gen-ir - TestProject.xcarchive

Building

gen-ir is implemented as a Swift Package, so you can either open Package.swift in an IDE or build via the command line:

# Debug output: ./.build/debug/gen-ir
swift build

# Release output: ./.build/release/gen-ir
swift build -c release

Remove older version

If you previously installed the test version during early access testing, run the following commands to remove the test version from your system before installing:

brew uninstall gen-ir &&
brew untap NinjaLikesCheez/tap