1. Introduction

The Firm library implements the Firm intermediate representation (ir). An old description of Firm can be found in [TLB:99].

libFirm contains algorithms for construction of the SSA form directly from the attributed syntax tree. A set of analyses and optimisation phases is provided. This version includes a complete backend for the IA32 architecture, as well as some unfinished backends for SPARC, ARM

• works exculsively on a graph based SSA represenation up to the code emission. Based on the work of C. Click and M. Trapp

• written in portable C. Known to run on msvc 6-8 Win32, gcc on Linux, FreeBSD, Cygwin

• includes doxygen documentation

• support for object oriented type hierarchies

• Analyses: dominance, loop tree, execution frequency, control dependencies, inter procedural call graph, rapid type, def-use, alias analysis, class hierarchy analysis, ...

• Optimisations: constant folding, local common subexpression elimination, global common subexpression elimination, code placement, operator strength reduction, scalar replacement, load/store, control flow optimisations, if-conversion, partial condition evaluation, reassociation, tail recursion elimination, inlining, procedure cloning, dead code elimination, ...

• local common subexpression eliminiation, constant folding, constant propagatation, arithmetic identities happen implicitely

• extensive checkers

• enhanced debugging support: breakpoints on node creation, entity creation, graph dumping, visual studio debug extension

• lowering of intrinsics, double word arithmetics, bitfields

• backend with SSA based register allocation including several algorithms for spilling and copy coalescing. Instruction and block scheduling, support for ABI handling.

• working ia32 backend with support for x87 and SSE2 floating point

• unfinished backends for SPARC, ARM

• connections to the Edison Design Group C and java frontends available.

2. Building and Installation

Prerequisites for the build:

• python (>=2.4)
• perl
• an ANSI C89 compiler (gcc, msvc known to work)

Building on unix variants/cygwin:

1. Change into the directory containing libfirms source

2. Create a directory named build 'mkdir build'. Change into this directory and execute the configure script. 'cd build ; ../configure'

3. Type 'make' to compile the package

4. You may install libfirm as super user by typing 'make install'

5. Usage

To generate FIRM code from a compiler frontend read the documentation "libFIRM: A Library for Compiler Optimization Reaserch Implementing Firm", UKA tech-report 2002-5. About Firm you can learn in UKA tech-report 1999-14.

4. Contact

You can contact us at firm@ipd.info.uni-karlsruhe.de

There's a mailing list here: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/libfirm-user

We have a bugtracker at: http://pp.info.uni-karlsruhe.de/~firm/bugs