inkwell VS LiteDB

Secondly, I have learned about LLVM, and I have learned about the Inkwell library on Rust (It's a New Kind of Wrapper for Exposing LLVM (Safely)). Has anyone used this library before? Is this a good practice? Is it suitable for my compiler? Can I write some optimization passes of my own using this library?

I am trying to use the inkwell Rust crate for working with LLVM. In Cargo.toml, I have specified the LLVM version using features = ["llvm15-0"]

inkwell is a great llvm binding for rust and it has an implementation of kaleidoscope

I'm working on a compiler that uses the LLVM wrapper Inkwell for compilation. In order to compile something in inkwell, unless I'm missing something (which I very well might be), you need two structs:

Compiler backends (If building JIT/machine compiled langauges) 1. cranelift 2. inkwell - safe rust wrapper around llvm

Haha small world. I think we go to the same university and I took the same or similar course a few years ago. If somebody hasn't done the work for you, you may have to do some instrumentation yourself depending on what you want to track IMO https://github.com/TheDan64/inkwell is the best LLVM wrapper for Rustland (Python's llvmlite is a bit easier to use though)

I'm currently using the Inkwell bindings for Rust, which I've found actually pretty nice. In terms of generating LLVM IR, the C bindings (which is what Inkwell uses internally) can do anything you want them to (definitely not limited to trivial languages as someone else here said.) I'm even using the LLVM garbage collection infrastructure, with no problems (well, no problems in generating it; the LLVM GC infrastructure works pretty well but is sparsely documented, so actually writing a GC is fairly difficult, but it's doable). The C bindings are actually more stable than the C++ bindings (!), although not quite as stable as the textual IR format; but without the bindings you would have to write code to generate the IR yourself, the compiler would be slower as it must be emitted as text and then reparsed in a different process, and you would have less control over optimization.

safe llvm bindings https://github.com/TheDan64/inkwell

As we reviewed in this article LLVM IR has many use-cases and allows us to analyze and optimize source code through its passes. Knowing IR language itself will help us to write our passes and build projects around it for debugging, testing, optimizing. Currently, LLVM IR doesn't have Rust API. It's mainly used through the C++ library. However, some user-created repos are available on crates.io. There is a Rust binding to LLVM's C API - llvm-sys and two other, more Rusty APIs that are using LLVM: inkwell and llvm-ir. And finally, if you want to learn how to write a LLVM pass you should start here.

Personally, I used to use LiteDB which is a NoSQL version which in v4 paired very nicely with F# thanks to Zaid's lovely LiteDB.FSharp library. Sadly, when v5 showed up, a lot of the F# niceties were lost given how the API was changed and v5 was not very F# friendly. You can still use it of course but you fall back to more unsafe F# code which is not ideal.

Maybe you want LiteDB? I don't think you need to write SQL, you can interact with the API.

Are you aware of LiteDB? It seems like your project is going for a very similar niche. Most people looking for this type of thing will probably go for the more mature and feature-rich solution (LiteDB). So if your project has some unique value proposition to distinguish it from LiteDB, you should elaborate on that.

Please consider using the primary key to generate an unique value on the db side.

LiteDB

Before checking this out, people might want to take a look through the issues and pull requests of which there are 500+ and 50+ respectively [1]. I was really optimistic about this project and it was headed in a great direction, but it's not in a production ready state, and it seems that the main guy behind it has decided to move onto other things. It's been about a year since there was any significant activity.

I just mention this because a lot of these little issues might only become more apparent after integrating the db into your project and so it can be a bit annoying. I ended up swapping to Linq2DB [1]. It's something, more or less, similar offering an ORM/LINQ type system as well as the ability to also use direct SQL if desired. But the neat thing is that it also uses a standardized API for the LINQ query language, so you can do things like swap from SQLite to PostgreSQL in one* line of code, so long as you're not using any provider specific extensions.

[1] - https://github.com/mbdavid/LiteDB

[2] - https://github.com/linq2db/linq2db

A mature NoSQL embedded/flatfile database like LiteDB would be nice. There are some similar Rust libraries but they aren't very close to production ready and the API tends to not be too user friendly. I had trouble finding one of these for a small app I had to write recently.