gllvm/README.md

# A Concurrent WLLVM in Go

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**TL; DR:**  A drop-in replacement for [wllvm](https://github.com/SRI-CSL/whole-program-llvm), that builds the
bitcode in parallel, and is faster.


## Overview


This project, `gllvm`, provides tools for building whole-program (or
whole-library) LLVM bitcode files from an unmodified C or C++
source package. It currently runs on `*nix` platforms such as Linux,
FreeBSD, and Mac OS X. It is a Go port of [wllvm](https://github.com/SRI-CSL/whole-program-llvm).

`gllvm` provides compiler wrappers that work in two
phases. The wrappers first invoke the compiler as normal. Then, for
each object file, they call a bitcode compiler to produce LLVM
bitcode. The wrappers then store the location of the generated bitcode
file in a dedicated section of the object file.  When object files are
linked together, the contents of the dedicated sections are
concatenated (so we don't lose the locations of any of the constituent
bitcode files). After the build completes, one can use a `gllvm`
utility to read the contents of the dedicated section and link all of
the bitcode into a single whole-program bitcode file. This utility
works for both executable and native libraries.

For more details see [wllvm](https://github.com/SRI-CSL/whole-program-llvm).

#### Prerequisites

To install `gllvm` you need the go language [tool](https://golang.org/doc/install).

To use `gllvm` you need clang/clang++ and the llvm tools llvm-link and llvm-ar.
`gllvm` is agnostic to the actual llvm version. `gllvm` also relies on standard build
tools such as `objcopy` and `ld`.


## Installation

To install, simply do
```
go get github.com/SRI-CSL/gllvm/cmd/...
```
This should install four binaries: `gclang`, `gclang++`, `get-bc`, and `gsanity-check`
in the `$GOPATH/bin` directory.

## Usage

`gclang` and
`gclang++` are the wrappers used to compile C and C++.  `get-bc` is used for
extracting the bitcode from a build product (either an object file, executable, library
or archive). `gsanity-check` can be used for detecting configuration errors.

Here is a simple example. Assuming that clang is in your `PATH`, you can build
bitcode for `pkg-config` as follows:

```
tar xf pkg-config-0.26.tar.gz
cd pkg-config-0.26
CC=gclang ./configure
make
```

This should produce the executable `pkg-config`. To extract the bitcode:
```
get-bc pkg-config
```

which will produce the bitcode module `pkg-config.bc`.


If clang and the llvm tools are not in your `PATH`, you will need to set some 
environment variables.


 * `LLVM_COMPILER_PATH` can be set to the absolute path to the folder that
   contains the compiler and other LLVM tools such as `llvm-link` to be used.
   This prevents searching for the compiler in your PATH environment variable.
   This can be useful if you have different versions of clang on your system
   and you want to easily switch compilers without tinkering with your PATH
   variable.
   Example `LLVM_COMPILER_PATH=/home/user/llvm_and_clang/Debug+Asserts/bin`.


 * `LLVM_CC_NAME` can be set if your clang compiler is not called `clang` but
    something like `clang-3.7`. Similarly `LLVM_CXX_NAME` can be used to
    describe what the C++ compiler is called. We also pay attention to the
    environment  variables `LLVM_LINK_NAME` and `LLVM_AR_NAME` in an
    analagous way, since they too get adorned with suffixes in various Linux
    distributions.

Another useful environment variable is `WLLVM_CONFIGURE_ONLY`. Its use is explained in the 
README of  [wllvm](https://github.com/SRI-CSL/whole-program-llvm). 

`gllvm` does not support the dragonegg plugin. All other features of `wllvm`, such as logging, and the bitcode store,
are supported in exactly the same fashion.

### License

GLLVM is released under the MIT license. See the file `LICENSE` for [details.](LICENSE)