Programming Language with LLVM

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.