A short guide to building a tiny programming language in Haskell with LLVM.

Stephen Diehl

Haskell LLVM Tutorial

Read Online:

• HTML
• Source Code
• Condensed Code

Building with Stack ( Recommended )

Using the LLVM toolchain requires several system libraries:

$ apt-get install llvm-3.5
$ apt-get install libedit-dev

The resulting page and chapter samples can be built using the given Makefile.

$ stack build
$ stack ghc preprocessor.hs -- -o preprocessor 
$ stack exec make

Building with Cabal

$ apt-get install llvm-3.5
$ apt-get install libedit-dev

Install the dependencies:

$ cabal sandbox init

If you just want to compile the examples then configure with the following command. Ensure that llvm-config is on your $PATH.

$ cabal configure

If you want to build the tutorial text locally configure with the following. This will install pandoc from source which will take a while.

$ cabal configure --flags=tutorial

Then install the dependencies:

$ cabal install --only-dependencies

Source Code

The source code for the example compiler of each chapter is included in the /src folder. With the dependencies installed these can be built using the Makefile at the root level or with cabal.

$ cabal run chapter2
$ cabal run chapter6

$ make chapter2
$ make chapter6

A smaller version of the code without the parser frontend can be found in the llvm-tutorial-standalone repository. The LLVM code generation technique is identical.

Editing

This is an open source project, patches and corrections always welcome.

To generate the HTML page:

$ make tutorial.html

A standalone PDF can also be generated with:

$ make tutorial.pdf

License

Text is adapted from the LLVM tutorial and is subsequently licensed under the LLVM license.

The Haskell source files are released under the MIT license. Copyright (c) 2013-2016, Stephen Diehl