[LLVMdev] JIT question: Inner workings of getPointerToFunction()

[Prakash Prabhu]

Hi,

I was just reading through the Kaleidoscope tutorial (which is greatly
written and understandable, thanks! ) hoping to get some glimpse about the
workings of the JIT and the optimizations that are done at run time. I am
curious as to how LLVM's JIT dynamically generates native code from bit code
at run time and runs that code (I think my question is also somewhat more
general in the sense how does any JIT system translate some form of low
level IR (which presumably is  JIT's data) into native code which is
actually made executable at runtime). Specifically, in the following code
snippet (from the tutorial), how does getPointerToFunction() actually
generate native code for function LF and the call to FP succeed as if FPtr
was a pointer to statically compiled code ?

// JIT the function, returning a function pointer.
void *FPtr = TheExecutionEngine->getPointerToFunction(LF);

// Cast it to the right type (takes no arguments, returns a double) so we
// can call it as a native function.
  double (*FP)() = (double (*)())FPtr;

I took a look at getPointerToFunction() and it seems it calls
materializeFunction ( is this the run time code generator ? ) where most of
the work is done. It would be great if you could point out a good starting
place to understand the whole JIT'ing place in the source  and relevant
documentation (I read the paper about Jello). Also are there any dynamic
optimizations that are currently done using the JIT ?

Thanks for your time !

- Prakash
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