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.. Copyright (C) 2015-2022 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
Originally contributed by David Malcolm <dmalcolm@redhat.com>
This is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it
under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU
General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program. If not, see
<https://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
Tutorial part 5: Implementing an Ahead-of-Time compiler
-------------------------------------------------------
If you have a pre-existing language frontend that's compatible with
libgccjit's license, it's possible to hook it up to libgccjit as a
backend. In the previous example we showed
how to do that for in-memory JIT-compilation, but libgccjit can also
compile code directly to a file, allowing you to implement a more
traditional ahead-of-time compiler ("JIT" is something of a misnomer
for this use-case).
The essential difference is to compile the context using
:c:func:`gcc_jit_context_compile_to_file` rather than
:c:func:`gcc_jit_context_compile`.
The "brainf" language
*********************
In this example we use libgccjit to construct an ahead-of-time compiler
for an esoteric programming language that we shall refer to as "brainf".
brainf scripts operate on an array of bytes, with a notional data pointer
within the array.
brainf is hard for humans to read, but it's trivial to write a parser for
it, as there is no lexing; just a stream of bytes. The operations are:
====================== =============================
Character Meaning
====================== =============================
``>`` ``idx += 1``
``<`` ``idx -= 1``
``+`` ``data[idx] += 1``
``-`` ``data[idx] -= 1``
``.`` ``output (data[idx])``
``,`` ``data[idx] = input ()``
``[`` loop until ``data[idx] == 0``
``]`` end of loop
Anything else ignored
====================== =============================
Unlike the previous example, we'll implement an ahead-of-time compiler,
which reads ``.bf`` scripts and outputs executables (though it would
be trivial to have it run them JIT-compiled in-process).
Here's what a simple ``.bf`` script looks like:
.. literalinclude:: ../examples/emit-alphabet.bf
:lines: 1-
.. note::
This example makes use of whitespace and comments for legibility, but
could have been written as::
++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++<
[>.+<-]
It's not a particularly useful language, except for providing
compiler-writers with a test case that's easy to parse. The point
is that you can use :c:func:`gcc_jit_context_compile_to_file`
to use libgccjit as a backend for a pre-existing language frontend
(provided that the pre-existing frontend is compatible with libgccjit's
license).
Converting a brainf script to libgccjit IR
******************************************
As before we write simple code to populate a :c:type:`gcc_jit_context *`.
.. literalinclude:: ../examples/tut05-bf.c
:start-after: #define MAX_OPEN_PARENS 16
:end-before: /* Entrypoint to the compiler. */
:language: c
Compiling a context to a file
*****************************
Unlike the previous tutorial, this time we'll compile the context
directly to an executable, using :c:func:`gcc_jit_context_compile_to_file`:
.. code-block:: c
gcc_jit_context_compile_to_file (ctxt,
GCC_JIT_OUTPUT_KIND_EXECUTABLE,
output_file);
Here's the top-level of the compiler, which is what actually calls into
:c:func:`gcc_jit_context_compile_to_file`:
.. literalinclude:: ../examples/tut05-bf.c
:start-after: /* Entrypoint to the compiler. */
:end-before: /* Use the built compiler to compile the example to an executable:
:language: c
Note how once the context is populated you could trivially instead compile
it to memory using :c:func:`gcc_jit_context_compile` and run it in-process
as in the previous tutorial.
To create an executable, we need to export a ``main`` function. Here's
how to create one from the JIT API:
.. literalinclude:: ../examples/tut05-bf.c
:start-after: #include "libgccjit.h"
:end-before: #define MAX_OPEN_PARENS 16
:language: c
.. note::
The above implementation ignores ``argc`` and ``argv``, but you could
make use of them by exposing ``param_argc`` and ``param_argv`` to the
caller.
Upon compiling this C code, we obtain a bf-to-machine-code compiler;
let's call it ``bfc``:
.. code-block:: console
$ gcc \
tut05-bf.c \
-o bfc \
-lgccjit
We can now use ``bfc`` to compile .bf files into machine code executables:
.. code-block:: console
$ ./bfc \
emit-alphabet.bf \
a.out
which we can run directly:
.. code-block:: console
$ ./a.out
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
Success!
We can also inspect the generated executable using standard tools:
.. code-block:: console
$ objdump -d a.out |less
which shows that libgccjit has managed to optimize the function
somewhat (for example, the runs of 26 and 65 increment operations
have become integer constants 0x1a and 0x41):
.. code-block:: console
0000000000400620 <main>:
400620: 80 3d 39 0a 20 00 00 cmpb $0x0,0x200a39(%rip) # 601060 <data
400627: 74 07 je 400630 <main
400629: eb fe jmp 400629 <main+0x9>
40062b: 0f 1f 44 00 00 nopl 0x0(%rax,%rax,1)
400630: 48 83 ec 08 sub $0x8,%rsp
400634: 0f b6 05 26 0a 20 00 movzbl 0x200a26(%rip),%eax # 601061 <data_cells+0x1>
40063b: c6 05 1e 0a 20 00 1a movb $0x1a,0x200a1e(%rip) # 601060 <data_cells>
400642: 8d 78 41 lea 0x41(%rax),%edi
400645: 40 88 3d 15 0a 20 00 mov %dil,0x200a15(%rip) # 601061 <data_cells+0x1>
40064c: 0f 1f 40 00 nopl 0x0(%rax)
400650: 40 0f b6 ff movzbl %dil,%edi
400654: e8 87 fe ff ff callq 4004e0 <putchar@plt>
400659: 0f b6 05 01 0a 20 00 movzbl 0x200a01(%rip),%eax # 601061 <data_cells+0x1>
400660: 80 2d f9 09 20 00 01 subb $0x1,0x2009f9(%rip) # 601060 <data_cells>
400667: 8d 78 01 lea 0x1(%rax),%edi
40066a: 40 88 3d f0 09 20 00 mov %dil,0x2009f0(%rip) # 601061 <data_cells+0x1>
400671: 75 dd jne 400650 <main+0x30>
400673: 31 c0 xor %eax,%eax
400675: 48 83 c4 08 add $0x8,%rsp
400679: c3 retq
40067a: 66 0f 1f 44 00 00 nopw 0x0(%rax,%rax,1)
We also set up debugging information (via
:c:func:`gcc_jit_context_new_location` and
:c:macro:`GCC_JIT_BOOL_OPTION_DEBUGINFO`), so it's possible to use ``gdb``
to singlestep through the generated binary and inspect the internal
state ``idx`` and ``data_cells``:
.. code-block:: console
(gdb) break main
Breakpoint 1 at 0x400790
(gdb) run
Starting program: a.out
Breakpoint 1, 0x0000000000400790 in main (argc=1, argv=0x7fffffffe448)
(gdb) stepi
0x0000000000400797 in main (argc=1, argv=0x7fffffffe448)
(gdb) stepi
0x00000000004007a0 in main (argc=1, argv=0x7fffffffe448)
(gdb) stepi
9 >+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++<
(gdb) list
4
5 cell 0 = 26
6 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++
7
8 cell 1 = 65
9 >+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++<
10
11 while cell#0 != 0
12 [
13 >
(gdb) n
6 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++
(gdb) n
9 >+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++<
(gdb) p idx
$1 = 1
(gdb) p data_cells
$2 = "\032", '\000' <repeats 29998 times>
(gdb) p data_cells[0]
$3 = 26 '\032'
(gdb) p data_cells[1]
$4 = 0 '\000'
(gdb) list
4
5 cell 0 = 26
6 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++
7
8 cell 1 = 65
9 >+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++<
10
11 while cell#0 != 0
12 [
13 >
Other forms of ahead-of-time-compilation
****************************************
The above demonstrates compiling a :c:type:`gcc_jit_context *` directly
to an executable. It's also possible to compile it to an object file,
and to a dynamic library. See the documentation of
:c:func:`gcc_jit_context_compile_to_file` for more information.
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