inkwell VS lalrpop

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.

And some related parser tools: - https://github.com/kevinmehall/rust-peg - https://github.com/pest-parser/pest - https://github.com/lalrpop/lalrpop

lalrpop

Rust is a very nice langage for implementing compilers, and has a nice ecosystem for it (logos, rust-peg, lalrpop, astmaker -- this one is mine --, etc...).

rust-langdev has a lot of libraries for building compilers in Rust. Perhaps you could use these to make your implementation easier, and revisit it later if you want to build things from scratch. I'd suggest logos for lexing, LALRPOP / chumsky for parsing, and rust-gc for garbage collection.

Hi! For one of my projects I am currently using lalrpop (https://github.com/lalrpop/lalrpop/tree/master/doc/calculator/src), which is far from complete, but has the basic syntax I was looking for. I took some examples and worked around some lexer stuff but I’m currently happy with it. If you use it and have Intellij stuff installed, you can also use a plug-in for highlighting and SOMETIMES error checking. Otherwise, even VSCode had a great plug-in for highlighting!

How would you compare and contrast this with, say, lalrpop?

lalrpop is great. It's a completely different approach from nom, but for parsing a programming language, I would at least consider it. RustPython uses it.

I presume LALRPOP handles left recursion just fine.

I wanted to share an experimental side project I have been working on for some time. I constantly use commands like `jq` and `yq` for processing structured data in my day job and I was curious if a similar idea could be applied to images.

Another goal of mine was to get some exposure to with rust. I discovered the LALRPOP parser generator which really helped moved the project along (https://github.com/lalrpop/lalrpop)

The key point here is that we are going to depend on the lalrpop library to generate the parser based on the formal grammar we define. Note that we have it as part of the [build-dependencies] section and we only depend on a tiny utility crate called lalrpop-util at runtime. The reason for that is the main lalrpop "magic" would happen during the crate compilation (in the build.rs file) when lalrpop would generate the deterministic pushdown automaton based on our grammar. The code generation logic is not required to be part of our interpreter, we only need a few utility methods from the lalrpop-util for the automaton to operate. You might have noticed that we also enable the lexer feature of lalrpop, because we are going to use lexer provided by lalrpop as well (please refer to the Part I if you do not know what the lexer is).