UQCS Tech Talk - An Intro to Code Analysis with LLVM

Welcome to the repo! Here we have the base code to get you started with creating a basic code analysis tool using LLVM and its Libtooling framework.

Quick Setup

To generate the required boilerplate structure and install the necessary dependencies, simply run

./setup.sh

In order to use the script, you need to have either the apt or brew package managers installed on your system.

Note that for some Linux distributions the version of cmake that will be installed by the package managers is insufficient to build the LLVM libraries. In this case, you will need to install an updated version of cmake yourself - details about this can be found here.

Manual Setup

If you would like to manually set up the development environment, do the following:

1. Install the necessary build tools (git, cmake and ninja)

   sudo apt install git cmake ninja-build
   

   sudo brew install git cmake ninja-build
   

2. Clone the LLVM repository

   git clone \
       https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project.git \
       --branch llvmorg-12.0.1
   

3. Create a new project directory under llvm-project/clang-tools-extra and copy the provided source code into it

   cp -r \
       ./src \
       ./llvm-project/clang-tools-extra/uqcs_demo
   

4. Register the project under llvm-project/clang-tools-extra/CMakeLists.txt

   echo -e "\nadd_subdirectory(uqcs_demo)\n" >> \
       ./llvm-project/clang-tools-extra/CMakeLists.txt
   

5. Create a new build directory and move into it

   mkdir ./llvm-project/build 
   cd ./llvm-project/build
   

6. Run the cmake initialisation sequence

   cmake -G Ninja ../llvm \
       -DLLVM_ENABLE_PROJECTS="clang;clang-tools-extra" \
       -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE:STRING=Release
   

7. Build the project (from within the build directory)

   ninja uqcs_demo
   

Locating the executable

When the project is built, the resulting executable (uqcs_demo) will be located under llvm-project/build/bin.

Rebuilding the project

When you've made changes to the source code under llvm-project/clang-tools-extra/uqcs_demo you can rebuild the final executable by running the following from the build directory:

ninja uqcs_demo