LLVM to MIPS

This repository contains the source for the tutorial series on writing a backend for LLVM that compiles to MIPS Release 1 assembly.

This serves as a guide to anyone interested in developing a backend for LLVM.

The name of this backend is Nova, just to distinguish from the already existing Mips backend. (Most of the code is derived from that)

Running locally

The code snippets for the pages are extracted and embedded into the webpage source by reading code enclosed within special snippet comments in the LLVM source.

This repository has currently checked in the snippets.json file that stores all these extracted snippets, but this might change later. (in fact, probably should change later)

You can skip steps 1 and 4 if you just want to build and develop the website content without changing the code for the Nova backend.

1. Clone the llvm-project directory.

cd llvm-mips-tutorial # or whatever you name this
                      # book-tutorial-project's directory
git clone --single-branch --branch nova-backend https://github.com/optimisan/llvm-project.git

2. Clone this repository.

cd llvm-mips-tutorial
git clone https://github.com/optimisan/llvm-mips-backend.git

3. Copy (or move) the .env.example to .env.

cd llvm-mips-tutorial/llvm-mips-backend # cd into this project
cp .env.example .env
open_with_editor .env

Enter the absolute path to the llvm-project folder, for example, like this:

# in file .env
LLVM_ROOT_DIR=/home/username/llvm-mips-tutorial/llvm-project

4. Build the snippets. Requires python and the python-dotenv package.

# optional: pip3 install python-dotenv 
./build-snippets

5. Build and view the website!

npm install
npm run dev

Open localhost:4321 in your browser.

Snippets

Look at tools/snippet-parser/README.md for the snippets syntax.

Other stuff that Astro added to this README

Command	Action
npm install	Installs dependencies
npm run dev	Starts local dev server at localhost:4321
npm run build	Build your production site to ./dist/
npm run preview	Preview your build locally, before deploying
npm run astro ...	Run CLI commands like astro add, astro check
npm run astro -- --help	Get help using the Astro CLI

👀 Want to learn more?

Check out Starlight’s docs, read the Astro documentation, or jump into the Astro Discord server.