Hello Everyone!
I’ve been working on writing a language (called Conch) over the past few months (still very much in development, not the point of this post), and I’ve recently started the process of linking LLVM against it. The LLVM build implementation, which is the main topic of this post, can be found here. The project itself is written in C++, but I’m using Zig as the build system since I have a good amount of experience with the language. I switched from CMake a couple months back and haven’t looked back. The build system is incredible, even if I have to hand roll something every now and then (like manually parsing cdb fragments to make a compile commands db for clangd).
As I said, I’m now working on linking LLVM against Conch. Something I dislike about modern development is dynamic linking, but I think static linking can be just as unwieldy and unmaintainable if developers have to manually download a metric ton of dependencies manually. Package managers help with this, but I’ve found the most consistent solution is to build from source. With these opinionated (and maybe not widely agreed with) ideas firmly rooted, I took to compiling LLVM from source. While I’m slowly making my way through the libraries that I need to, it’s been super rewarding seeing compiled artifacts from scratch that can link against a test C++ program. I just crossed over the first hurdle that is compiling LLVMCore, but there’s so so so much more to do. It’s also great being able to cross compile easily since I have Zig backing the build.
Again, there’s still a lot to configure compilation wise for LLVM before it can function as a true backend, but I’m happy with the progress I’ve made so far and just wanted to share with the community. If you’re interested in the rest of the build, you can check it out here. It’s got some cool stuff, like compile command db generation, cross-platform packaging, and even rules for a custom test runner/allocator for C++.
You might take a look at the rest of the repo and wonder why I’m thinking about LLVM so early (i.e. the parser is still being tested). The main reason for this is that I’m extremely busy at the moment with other obligations, so I’m just going through the mindless task of scanning though the llvm-project source tree now instead of when I actually have the bandwidth to do more ‘meaningful’ work.
While it might be inappropriate to ask for stars on a C++ repo, a considerable amount of the project so far consists of Zig code for the build system, so if you like what I’m doing, a star would be greatly appreciated!
Cheers!