[LLVMdev] Code documentation

[Vladimir Prus]

Chris Lattner wrote:
> On Thu, 8 Apr 2004, Vladimir Prus wrote:
> > is there any documentation for LLVM codebase other than produced by
> > doxygen?
>
> Yes, most definitely:
> http://llvm.cs.uiuc.edu/Documentation.html

Hmm.. I've looked at almost everything there... except for "Programmer 
Manual". Well, printing it now ;-)

> > The reason I'm asking is that doxygen docs are
> > (1) not very complete at the moment, as lot of classes don't even have a
> > description
> > (2) is generally not the best way to get high-level view of a big
> > codebase.
>
> Quite true.  Note that, in general, there are reasonable comments and
> descriptions of each interface at the top of each header file.  I don't
> think that doxygen picks these descriptions up, so it might be good to
> look there.  For example, contrast this:
> http://llvm.cs.uiuc.edu/doxygen/LoopInfo_8h-source.html
>  to this:
> http://llvm.cs.uiuc.edu/doxygen/classllvm_1_1Loop.html

Okay, understood.

> > This looks a nice design, given that all code is in SSA, but I've spend
> > considerable time today before understanding it, because I first tried to
> > look up a  ways to find the instruction which defines tmp.1, then looked
> > for a method which returns destination of an instruction, and so on..
>
> This should be described in the developer's guide:
> http://llvm.cs.uiuc.edu/docs/ProgrammersManual.html#iterate_chains
>
> Like all documentation, it can probably be improved.  If you would like to
> contribute a paragraph or two describing what you've learned, we would
> love to include it in the manual for others to learn from. :)

Yes, I'll try to  see if those paragraphs can be improved -- as written, then 
still don't say that operand can be just pointer to instruction.

> > I realize all the developers must be busy, but some overview would be
> > really good.
>
> Sure, we think that documentation is really important.  If you have any
> questions that are not covered in the documentation, please feel free to
> ask on the list.

Thanks,
Volodya


>
> -Chris