Top 10 intermediate-representation Open-Source Projects

miasm

1 3,338 6.6 Python

Reverse engineering framework in Python
write-you-a-haskell

4 3,304 0.0 Haskell

Building a modern functional compiler from first principles. (http://dev.stephendiehl.com/fun/)

Project mention: A decade of developing a programming language | news.ycombinator.com | 2023-11-14

I highly recommend https://github.com/sdiehl/write-you-a-haskell as it is very developer friendly. It’s not complete, but it really gets the gears turning and will set you up for writing your own Hendley-Milner style type checker.

InfluxDB

www.influxdata.com sponsored

Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.
mir

19 2,184 7.7 C

A lightweight JIT compiler based on MIR (Medium Internal Representation) and C11 JIT compiler and interpreter based on MIR

Project mention: Ravi is a dialect of Lua, with JIT and AOT compilers | news.ycombinator.com | 2024-03-18

MIR comes from the Rubyverse and isn't related to LLVM MLIR.
https://github.com/vnmakarov/mir?tab=readme-ov-file#mir

binaryninja-api

9 812 9.7 C++

Public API, examples, documentation and issues for Binary Ninja

Project mention: The Hiew Hex Editor | news.ycombinator.com | 2024-01-02

ddisasm

4 617 9.5 C++

A fast and accurate disassembler
vast

2 334 9.9 C++

VAST is an experimental compiler pipeline designed for program analysis of C and C++. It provides a tower of IRs as MLIR dialects to choose the best fit representations for a program analysis or further program abstraction.

Project mention: Print(“lol”) doubled the speed of my Go function | news.ycombinator.com | 2023-08-23

Most languages target C or LLVM, and C and LLVM have a fundamentally lossy compilation processes.
To get around this, you'd need a hodge podge of pre compiler directives, or take a completely different approach.
I found a cool project that uses a "Tower of IRs" that can restablish source to binary provenance, which, seems to me, to be on the right track:
https://github.com/trailofbits/vast
I'd definitely like to see the compilation processes be more transparent and easy to work with.

clangir

2 274 10.0

A new (MLIR based) high-level IR for clang.

Project mention: Decoding C/C++ Compilation Process: From Source Code to Binary | /r/cpp | 2023-06-08

It could be cool to see some explanation of CFG representations or GIMPLE/LLVM here. GCC/Clang can print those out as text, or just compile to that code and not go lower if you ask them to. There are some interesting things you can do with bytecode, like Rellic, AFL++, or optview2. It seems a bit reductive imo to go straight from high-level code to disassembly without at all examining any layers in between. Especially if we use something like Polygeist or CIR.

WorkOS

workos.com sponsored

The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.
ravi-compiler

2 63 0.0 C

Parser and compiler for Ravi and Lua
thorin2

2 43 9.7 C++

The Higher ORder INtermediate representation - next gen

Project mention: Can one use lambda calculus as an IR? | /r/Compilers | 2023-06-06

atom

1 18 9.0 Rust

Atom is a novel intermediate representation for applications and a standalone tool that is powered by chen. (by AppThreat)

Project mention: Show devsecops: OWASP dep-scan v5 - a next-generation security and risk audit tool for everyone | /r/devsecops | 2023-12-05

Today, it gives me great pleasure to announce OWASP dep-scan v5. Like everyone, I was constantly frustrated with the amount of false positives generated by all Software Composition Analysis tools (including mine) and wanted to do something. I worked closely with a few colleagues (Caroline, Tim, Saket, and David) for a year to build the various capabilities that together form depscan v5.

NOTE: The open source projects on this list are ordered by number of github stars. The number of mentions indicates repo mentiontions in the last 12 Months or since we started tracking (Dec 2020).