llvm: strategies to build JIT content incrementall

Question

I want my language backend to build functions and types incrementally but don't pollute the main module and context when functions and types fail to build successfully (due to problems with the user input).

I ask an earlier question regarding this. One strategy i can see for this would be building everything in temp module and LLVMContext, migrating to main context only after success, but i am not sure if that is possible with the current API. For instance, i wouldn't know know to migrate that content between different contexts, as they are supposed to represent isolated islands of LLVM functionality, but maybe there is always the alternative to save everything to .bc and load somewhere else?

what other strategies would you suggest for achieving this?

Answer 1

Assuming you have two modules - source and destination, it's possible to copy a function from source to destination. The code in LLVM you can use as an example is the body of the LLVM linker, in lib/linker/LinkModules.cpp.

In particular, look at the linkFunctionProto and linkFunctionBody methods in that file. linkFunctionBody copies the function definition, and uses the llvm::CloneFunctionInto utility for the heavy lifting.

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As for LLVMContext, unless you specifically need to run several LLVM instances simultaneously in different threads, don't worry about it too much and just use getGlobalContext() everywhere a context is required. Read this doc page for more information.