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

Haskell LLVM Tutorial

Read Online:

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

Building with Nix

If you are currently using Nix package manager or NixOS, is to install all dependencies, both Haskell and system libraries, is to use the default.nix configuration provided. From the source directory simply run:

$ nix-shell

This will install binary packages for all dependencies including ghc, llvm, haskeline and llvm-general in a self-contained environment that is very likely to work out of the box.

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.