After the book on LLVM core libraries, I want to have a look at the cookbook.
Discussion
The idea was that once I had a broad view of LLVM, I could try to apply some recipes for what I wanted to do. Let’s just say that I was deeply mistaken.
First, the two authors have a very different way of writing code. One of them is… rubbish. I don’t think there is another way of saying this, but this is C++, and the guy writes C++ code as if it was C code, no class, with static states, without the override keyword. If such a guy is a professional developer, I’m sorry but I’m very scared about anything he would write professionally.
The second guy is better (he uses override, for instance, so it’s very disturbing to see both styles in the same book), it’s just too bad that the code he writes seems to be just showing things existing in LLVM, but no real recipes (OK, I’m exaggerating, there are a few such examples, but the majority is “execute that command to see how LLVM does this”, and just doing “this” doesn’t have any relevance in the big picture.
I suppose the only relevant and interesting parts are the first few recipes that are focused on reusing LLVM parts for a custom language. The rest is basically explanations of the later stages in a compiler. Basically what you would get from my previous review, without the explanations…
Conclusion
Have you ever read a recipe book that will explain how to prepare your kitchen for cooking instead of actually cooking recipes? This book is like that. You might learn how to use LLVM commands, but not LLVM libraries. Avoid.
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