libFirm -- A graph based SSA intermediate representation

1. Introduction

The Firm library implements the Firm intermediate representation (ir). An old description of Firm can be found in [TLB:99].

libFirm contains algorithms for construction of the SSA form directly from the attributed syntax tree. A set of analyses and optimization phases is provided. This version includes a complete backend for the IA32 architecture, as well as some unfinished backends for SPARC, ARM

1.1. Features

• works exclusively on a graph based SSA representation up to the code emission. Based on the work of C. Click and M. Trapp
• written in portable C99. Known to run on gcc on Linux, FreeBSD, Cygwin, clang, ICC on windows.
• includes doxygen documentation
• support for object oriented type hierarchies
• Analyses: dominance, loop tree, execution frequency, control dependencies, inter procedural call graph, rapid type, def-use, alias analysis, class hierarchy analysis, ...
• Optimizations: constant folding, local common subexpression elimination, global common subexpression elimination, code placement, operator strength reduction, scalar replacement, load/store, control flow optimizations, if-conversion, partial condition evaluation, reassociation, tail recursion elimination, inlining, procedure cloning, dead code elimination, ...
• local common subexpression eliminiation, constant folding, constant propagatation, arithmetic identities happen implicitely
• extensive checkers
• enhanced debugging support: breakpoints on node creation, entity creation, graph dumping, visual studio debug extension
• lowering of intrinsics, double word arithmetics, bitfields
• backend with SSA based register allocation including several algorithms for spilling and copy coalescing. Instruction and block scheduling, support for ABI handling.
• working ia32 backend with support for x87 and SSE2 floating point
• unfinished backends for SPARC, ARM, AMD64

2. Building and Installation

Prerequisites for the build:

• python (2.6.x, 2.7.x or >=3.3 are supported)
• perl
• an ANSI C99 compiler (gcc, clang, icc are known to work)

Building on unix variants/cygwin:

1. Change into the directory containing libfirms source

2. Create a directory named build 'mkdir build'. Change into this directory and execute the configure script. 'cd build ; ../configure'

3. Type 'make' to compile the package

4. You may install libfirm as super user by typing 'make install'

5. Usage

To generate FIRM code from a compiler frontend read the documentation "libFIRM: A Library for Compiler Optimization Reaserch Implementing Firm", UKA tech-report 2002-5. About Firm you can learn in UKA tech-report 1999-14.

4. Contact

You can contact us at [email protected]

There's a mailing list here: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/libfirm-user

We have a bugtracker at: http://pp.info.uni-karlsruhe.de/~firm/bugs