What you need for this book

To begin exploring the world of LLVM, you can use a UNIX system, a Mac OS X system, or a Windows system, as long as they are equipped with a modern C++ compiler. The LLVM source code is very demanding on the C++ compiler used to compile it and uses the newest standards. This means that on Linux, you will need at least GCC 4.8.1; on Max OS X, you will need at least Xcode 5.1; and on Windows, you will need Visual Studio 2012.

Even though we explain how to build LLVM on Windows with Visual Studio, this book does not focus on this platform because some LLVM features are unavailable for it. For example, LLVM lacks loadable module support on Windows, but we show you how to write LLVM plugins that are built as shared libraries. In these cases, the only way to see this in practice is to use either Linux or Mac OS X.

If you do not want to build LLVM for yourself, you can use a prebuilt binary bundle. However, you will be restricted to use the platforms where this convenience is available.