Porting Clang to a new architecture

[Saleem Abdulrasool via cfe-commits]

On Monday, October 26, 2015, Ariel Arelovich via cfe-commits <
cfe-commits at lists.llvm.org> wrote:

> Hi:
>
> Where I'm working I've been asked to look into developing a C (by this I
> mean C89 C standard) compiler a new processor architecture being created
> inhouse.
>
> On looking at the options and brushing up on compiler theory, I came up
> with Flex/Bison, Writing the compiler from scratch or use Clang. I liked
> this option better because parsing and and analyzing c code to genereate
> somthing intermediate, and do this from scratch, seemed like reinventing
> the wheel (an incredibly complex wheel, at that).
>
> I've figured that if Clang, works with the standard compiler flow (that
> I've seen everywhere), it takes a C program and transforms it until it gets
> a intermediate language (which is machine independant). The Dragon Book,
> even calls this the output of the compiler Front End. From what I've read
> from the documentation This is what Clang is: a compiler front end. LLVM
> does optimization and translation to opcodes of known architectures. Is
> this correct? Or am I getting this wrong?
>

Correct.  clang is just the front end for C-like languages.  It will parse
and analyze the code (generating the AST).  The IR it generates is the LLVM
IR.

So, my question is: Would it be possible to use Clang in such a way that it
> takes a C program and generates an intermediate language so that I can work
> directly on that language to generate opcodes based on the architecture
> that we are currently developing?
>

Yes.  This is how clang already works.  It sounds like you should be
looking at LLVM, not clang since you are trying to support a new
architecture, not a language feature.


>
> Thank you, for any answers.
>
> PD: I know my question might be very hard to answer as it is not very
> specific. All I'm asking for, here, is a simple: "It could be done, start
> reading about this and that" or "It will be next to impossible, just try
> something else" (with a little explanation as to why, if that were
> possible, please).
>


-- 
Saleem Abdulrasool
compnerd (at) compnerd (dot) org
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