Programming Language with LLVM
Course description
How programming languages work under the hood? What’s the difference between compiler and interpreter? What is a virtual machine, and JIT-compiler? And what about the difference between functional and imperative programming?
There are so many questions when it comes to implementing a programming language!
The problem with “compiler classes” in school is such classes are usually presented as some “hardcore rocket science” which is only for advanced engineers.
Moreover, classic compiler books start from the least significant topic, such as Lexical analysis, going straight down to the theoretical aspects of formal grammars. And by the time of implementing the first Tokenizer module, students simply lose an interest to the topic, not having a chance to actually start implementing a programing language itself. And all this is spread to a whole semester of messing with tokenizers and BNF grammars, without understanding an actual semantics of programming languages.
I believe we should be able to build and understand a full programming language semantics, end-to-end, in 4-6 hours — with a content going straight to the point, showed in live coding sessions as pair-programming and described in a comprehensible way.
In the Programming Language with LLVM class we focus on compiling our language to LLVM IR, and build a lower-level programming language. Working closely with the LLVM compiler infrastructure level you will understand how lower-level compilation and production-level languages, such as C++, Rust, etc work today.
Implementing a programing language would also make your practical level in other programming languages more professional.
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Prerequisites
There are three prerequisites for this class.
The Programming Language with LLVM course is a natural extension for the previous classes — Building an Interpreter from scratch (aka Essentials of Interpretation), where we build also a full programming language, but at a higher, AST-level, and also Building a Virtual Machine. Unless you already have understanding of how programming languages work at this level, i.e. what eval, a closure, a scope chain, environments, and other constructs are — you have to take the interpreters class as a prerequisite.
Also, going to lower (bitcode/IR) level where production languages live, we need to have basic C++ experience. This class however is not about C++, so we use just very basic (and transferrable) to other languages constructs.
Who this class is for?
This class is for any curious engineer, who would like to gain skills of building complex systems (and building a programming language is an advanced engineering task!), and obtain a transferable knowledge for building such systems.
If you are interested specifically in LLVM, its compiler infrastructure, and how to build your own langauge, then this class is also for you.
What is used for implementation?
Since lower-level compilers are about performance, they are usually implemented in a low-level language such as C or C++. This is exactly what we use as well, however mainly basic features from C++, not distracting to C++ specifics. The code should be easily convertible and portable to any other language, e.g. to Rust or even higher-level languages such as Python. Using C++ also makes it easier implementing further JIT-compiler.
Note: we want our students to actually follow, understand and implement every detail of the LLVM compiler themselves, instead of just copy-pasting from final solution. Even though the full source code for the language is presented in the video lectures, the code repository for the project contains /* Implement here */ assignments, which students have to solve.
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All Course Lessons (20)
| # | Lesson Title | Duration | Access |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Introduction to LLVM IR and tools Demo | 13:34 | |
| 2 | LLVM program structure | Module | 06:18 | |
| 3 | Basic numbers | Main function | 10:21 | |
| 4 | Strings | Printf operator | 06:44 | |
| 5 | Parsing: S-expression to AST | 10:24 | |
| 6 | Symbols | Global variables | 06:40 | |
| 7 | Blocks | Environments | 10:00 | |
| 8 | Local variables | Stack allocation | 10:51 | |
| 9 | Binary expressions | Comparison operators | 04:16 | |
| 10 | Control flow: If expressions | While loops | 10:42 | |
| 11 | Function declarations | Call expression | 06:25 | |
| 12 | Introduction to Classes | Struct types | 09:29 | |
| 13 | Compiling Classes | 08:51 | |
| 14 | Instances | Heap allocation | 10:05 | |
| 15 | Property access | 05:16 | |
| 16 | Class Inheritance | vTable | 09:00 | |
| 17 | Methods application | 07:29 | |
| 18 | Functors – callable objects | 04:42 | |
| 19 | Closures, Cells, and Lambda expressions | 08:04 | |
| 20 | Final executable | Next steps | 06:53 |
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