[LLVMdev] Basic questions

[Graham Wakefield]

Hi,

I apologize in advance if this is not the correct place to ask these  
questions, but I would be very grateful for redirection to the  
appropriate list/docs if so.

I've just started with LLVM in the last week or so, and have worked  
my way through the Kaleidoscope tutorial, the IR docs & programmers  
manual, plus a few of the examples; everything makes sense. But  
there's one thing that has been hard for me to uncover: the how, when  
& which of deleting/clearing LLVM objects.

To elaborate, I'm working on a project in which users may define new  
expressions and values at runtime, within localized or globalized  
scope (but crucially, they may also destroy them), which are JIT- 
compiled to native code. This is not necessarily via a textual  
language, fwiw. From experiments I've found that the Module and  
ExecutionEngine appear to prefer to be static globals - is this  
right? How can I safely limit the scope of user-code definitions &  
clear them afterwards in this situation? It's been hard to find  
examples to answer this question, since most assume a global memory  
space or single task.

Likewise, should the lifetime of a PassManager match that of a  
Module, or is it better to create them and destroy them on-demand?  
Understanding scope & lifetime issues of the basic LLVM classes would  
help me to match their granularity to that of the tasks the users may  
wish to define.

Again, apologies if these questions are naive and out of context in  
this list, or if I've missed something in the documentation that  
would answer my questions.

Thanks again,

Graham