quick-protobuf VS inkwell

[quick-protobuf]: https://github.com/tafia/quick-protobuf

I actually went through all projects listed in [1] because I remember this very quirk. It turns out that there are many such libraries that have two variants of encode/decode functions, where the second variant prepends a varint length. In my brief inspection there do exist a few libraries with only the second variant (e.g. Rust quick-protobuf), which is legitimately problematic [2].

But if the project in question was indeed protobuf.js (see loeg's comments), it clearly distinguishes encode/decode vs. encodeDelimited/decodeDelimited. So I believe the project should not be blamed, and the better question would be why so many people chose to add this exact helper. Well, because Google itself also had the same helper [3]! So at this point protobuf should just standardize this simple framing format (with an explicitly different name though), instead of claiming that protobuf has no obligation to define one.

[1] https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/blob/main/docs/t...

[2] https://github.com/tafia/quick-protobuf/issues/130

[3] https://protobuf.dev/reference/java/api-docs/com/google/prot...

[4] https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/blob/main/src/go...

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.