Continuum Analytics: Documentation

# 1. Introduction

## 1.1. Overview

llvmlite is born of the desire to have a new Python binding to LLVM for use in Numba. Numba used to rely on llvmpy, but llvmpy became harder and harder to maintain, because of its cumbersome architecture and also because the C++11 requirement of recent LLVM versions don’t go well with the compiler and runtime ABI requirements of some Python versions (especially under Windows).

Moreover, llvmpy proved to be responsible for a sizable chunk of Numba’s compilation times, because of its inefficient layering and object encapsulation. Fixing this issue inside the llvmpy codebase seemed a time-consuming and uncertain task.

Therefore, the Numba developers decided to start a new binding from scratch, with an entire different architecture, centered around the specific requirements of a JIT compiler.

## 1.2. Philosophy

While llvmpy exposed large parts of the LLVM C++ API for direct calls into the LLVM library, llvmlite takes an entirely different approach. llvmlite starts from the needs of a JIT compiler and splits them into two decoupled tasks:

1. Construction of a module, function by function, instruction by instruction
2. Compilation and optimization of the module into machine code

The construction of a LLVM module doesn’t call the LLVM C++ API; rather, it constructs the LLVM Intermediate Representation in pure Python. This is the part of the IR layer.

The compilation of a LLVM module takes the IR in textual form and feeds it into LLVM’s parsing API. It then returns a thin wrapper around LLVM’s C++ module object. This is the part of the binding layer.

Once parsed, the module’s source code cannot be modified anymore; this is where llvmlite loses in flexibility compared to the direct mapping of C++ APIs into Python that was provided by llvmpy. The saving in maintenance effort, however, is large.

## 1.3. LLVM compatibility

Despite minimizing the API surface with LLVM, llvmlite is impacted by changes to LLVM’s C++ API (which can occur at every feature release). Therefore, each llvmlite version is targetted to a specific LLVM feature version. It should work accross all given bugfix releases of that version (for example, llvmlite 0.12.0 would work with LLVM 3.8.0 and 3.8.1, but with neither LLVM 3.7.0 nor 3.9.0).

Which LLVM version is supported is driven by Numba‘s requirements.

## 1.4. API stability

At this time, we reserve ourselves the possibility to slightly break the llvmlite API at each release. This is necessary because of changes in LLVM behaviour (for example differences in the IR accross versions), and because llvmlite as a young library still has room for improvement or fixes to the existing APIs.