icodein / lwvm

A lightweight virtual machine for education built on LLVM

Lightweight Virtual Machine

This project seeks to build a lightweight virtual machine implementation for educational purposes. The implementation prioritizes clear understandable code with helpful debugging features. Documentation and testing are high priorities to make it easier for newcomers to understand the code and make changes with confidence.

Building LWVM

Cloning

LWVM depends on LLVM for project infrastructure as well as base data structures. You will need to clone LLVM and LWVM in order to build LWVM. LWVM does not support building against a pre-installed LLVM.

git clone [email protected]:llvm/llvm-project.git
git clone [email protected]:llvm-beanz/lwvm.git

Building

LWVM builds using CMake through LLVM's build system. To configure LWVM as part of LLVM set LLVM_EXTERNAL_PROJECTS=lwvm and LLVM_EXTERNAL_LWVM_SOURCE_DIR=<path to lwvm> when you invoke CMake for LLVM:

cmake -G Ninja -DLLVM_ENABLE_PROJECTS=clang -DLLVM_EXTERNAL_PROJECTS=lwvm -DLLVM_EXTERNAL_LWVM_SOURCE_DIR=<path to lwvm> <path to llvm>

After CMake configures you can build lwvm by running:

ninja lwvm-test-depends # Builds all lwvm components
ninja check-lwvm        # Runs lwvm's test suite using LIT