LLVM backend#

Requirements

  • GCC (Gnu Compiler Collection)

  • GNAT (Ada compiler for GCC)

  • LLVM (Low-Level-Virtual Machine) and CLANG (Compiler front-end for LLVM): 3.5, 3.8, 3.9, 4.0, 5.0, 6.0, 7.0, 8.0, 9.0, 10.0, 11.0, 11.1, 12.0, 13.0 or 14.0

GCC/GNAT: GNU/Linux or Windows (MinGW/MSYS2)#

Hint

You need to install LLVM (usually depends on libedit, see #29). Debugging is supported with LLVM 3.5 or >=6.

GHDL is configured by configure and built by make.

  • First, GHDL needs to be configured. It is common to specify a PREFIX (installation directory like /usr/local or /opt/ghdl). Set the proper arg, ./configure --with-llvm-config, to select LLVM backend. If llvm-config is not in your path, you can specify it: ./configure --with-llvm-config=LLVM_INSTALL/bin/llvm-config.

  • Next, make starts the compilation process.

  • Finally, make install installs GHDL into the installation directory specified by PREFIX.

Example:

$ cd <ghdl>
$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ ../configure --with-llvm-config --prefix=PREFIX
$ make
$ make install

Hint

If you want to have stack backtraces on errors (like assert failure or index of out bounds), you need to configure and build libbacktrace from GCC (you don’t need to configure GCC). Then add the following arg to configure: --with-backtrace-lib=/path-to-gcc-build/libbacktrace/.libs/libbacktrace.a