[LLVMdev] help writing an IR targeting backend

[Humphreys, Jonathan]

I've got a newbie question and am looking for some pointers.  I want to implement a backend that targets another compiler IR format.  Looking through the backend documentation, the infrastructure is stated to be flexible enough to do this (and refers to a hypothetical GCC IR backend).  However, all of the documentation I've run across addresses actual ISA targets.  Is there any documentation or examples of IR targeting backends?

In particular, I'm wondering the best way to output the IR format - do I use the asm printer classes, JIT interface, or something else?  What are the best practices in representing another IR through the instruction classes?  How do I handle register allocation - disable it? Etc.

BTW, I already have an implementation that directly emits the target IR format using a function pass, much like it looks like the C generating back end did.  The translation is quite straight forward.  However, I'd like to be able to leverage the existing backend passes.  In particular, the target IR is not in SSA form, so I'd like to use the existing phi node instantiation pass in the backend.  My impression is that I need an actual backend that represents the target IR as machine instructions to be able to leverage the generic back end passes.

Thanks for any help,
Jon

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