[LLVMdev] Generating C code using LLVM

[mats petersson]

I got the impression that the AST was more like the AST of Kaleidoscope
than the AST of Clang - reading between the lines in the posts above.

But yes, Clang has much better tools for generating C code out of AST than
LLVM-IR will ever have. For example differnet types of loops [even when
they are "strange forms"] will be retained in their original form - so
loops using for(;;) as a forever loop will not turn into a while(true) or a
goto loop. In LLVM-IR, this sort of construction would become lost, since
the IR for any "endless loop" is identical.

--
Mats

On 15 May 2015 at 11:43, James Courtier-Dutton <james.dutton at gmail.com>
wrote:

> On 14 May 2015 at 20:44, Aditya Avinash <adityaavinash1 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hi,
> > I am trying to use LLVM to generate C (partly, Intel AVX) code to test
> some
> > abstractions. Apparently, most of the documentation is related to
> generating
> > LLVM-IR. Are there any tools to do this? (I have generated AST from these
> > abstractions. I want to generate C code from it).
> > Thank you! :)
> >
> > PS: If this is a wrong mailinglist, help me with the right one.
> >
>
> If you have your code at the AST level, you might as well use CLANG to
> work at the AST level and create C code as output.
> CLANG is closely linked to LLVM.
> There seems very little point in lowering the AST to LLVM-IR then
> output to C. You will loose useful structural information.
> E.g. By using something like this with CLANG would be better:
>
> http://eli.thegreenplace.net/2012/06/08/basic-source-to-source-transformation-with-clang
>
> Also, if you can create AST in a format CLANG understands, it can then
> automatically lower it to LLVM-IR, and you will have your completed
> compiler for your own language.
>
> The mailing list for CLANG is
> mailto: cfe-dev at cs.uiuc.edu
>
> Kind Regards
>
> James
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