[LLVMdev] using external functions from llvm

Óscar Fuentes ofv at wanadoo.es
Thu Aug 19 20:29:21 PDT 2010


Alec Benzer <alecbenzer at gmail.com> writes:

>> I'm afraid that you might be utterly confused about how to use LLVM.
>
> Er, I don't think so? I think I was mostly just confused about interfacing
> with external functions, since whoever wrote that blog post (
> http://www.gearleaf.com/blog/post/44) didn't seem to know what he was
> talking about (or he was doing stuff that once worked but now doesn't? I
> don't know). If you glance at that post I think you'll understand why I was
> doing what I was doing.
>
> anyway, I think I get it now, what I was trying to do seems to be working
> how I expect it to.

I've just looked at the blog post.

That is over-complicated. There is no need for a wrapping function for
calling external functions. It seems to me that the example on that blog
post is badly broken on several ways.

Instead of sys::DynamicLibrary::AddSymbol use
Module::getOrInsertFunction and then ExecutionEngine::addGlobalMapping
passing to it a pointer to your function. No wrappers needed. Be sure
that the FunctionType matches the signature of your function. Try first
with the simplest case (a function that takes 0 args and returs void)
then with an integer argument, etc. Things become really messy when you
reach C structs (let's forget about C++ classes.)

Finally, follow the standard requirements for setting up the JIT, like
calling InitializaNativeTarget at the beginning of `main'.

My advice is to forget about the example on that blog post and use as an
skeleton some of the examples that comes with LLVM, like HowToUseJIT or
Fibonacci.




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