Files
Tom Tromey e96af290ed Allow DWARF expressions to refer to variable values
In Ada, it is possible for a type to refer to the value of local
variables.  In many cases this can be described in the DWARF using
existing LLVM constructs.  However, in some cases, a DWARF expression
that uses multiple variables can be required.

This patch adds a mechanism to allow this.  It adds a new
DIVariableExpression class.  This class holds a DIExpression and a
list of variables.  When DWARF is emitted, each DW_OP_LLVM_arg in the
expression is changed to a DW_OP_GNU_variable_value referencing the
variable's DIE.

DW_OP_GNU_variable_value has been in use in GCC for years.  This has
also been proposed for DWARF 6, though unfortunately it seems to have
stalled:

    http://dwarfstd.org/ShowIssue.php?issue=161109.2

At present this feature is only supported for member offsets and
sizes, and the size of a DICompositeType.  These are just the spots
that I know are needed by gnat-llvm.
2026-02-11 14:24:59 +00:00
..
2025-07-15 13:38:08 +01:00

LLVM Documentation
==================

LLVM's documentation is written in reStructuredText, a lightweight
plaintext markup language (file extension `.rst`). While the
reStructuredText documentation should be quite readable in source form, it
is mostly meant to be processed by the Sphinx documentation generation
system to create HTML pages which are hosted on <https://llvm.org/docs/> and
updated after every commit. Manpage output is also supported, see below.

If you instead would like to generate and view the HTML locally, install
Sphinx <http://sphinx-doc.org/> and then do:

    cd <build-dir>
    cmake -DLLVM_ENABLE_SPHINX=true -DSPHINX_OUTPUT_HTML=true <src-dir>
    make -j3 docs-llvm-html
    $BROWSER <build-dir>/docs/html/index.html

The mapping between reStructuredText files and generated documentation is
`docs/Foo.rst` <-> `<build-dir>/docs//html/Foo.html` <-> `https://llvm.org/docs/Foo.html`.

If you are interested in writing new documentation, you will want to read
`SphinxQuickstartTemplate.rst` which will get you writing documentation
very fast and includes examples of the most important reStructuredText
markup syntax.

Manpage Output
===============

Building the manpages is similar to building the HTML documentation. The
primary difference is to use the `man` makefile target, instead of the
default (which is `html`). Sphinx then produces the man pages in the
directory `<build-dir>/docs/man/`.

    cd <build-dir>
    cmake -DLLVM_ENABLE_SPHINX=true -DSPHINX_OUTPUT_MAN=true <src-dir>
    make -j3 docs-llvm-man
    man -l <build-dir>/docs/man/FileCheck.1

The correspondence between .rst files and man pages is
`docs/CommandGuide/Foo.rst` <-> `<build-dir>/docs//man/Foo.1`.
These .rst files are also included during HTML generation so they are also
viewable online (as noted above) at e.g.
`https://llvm.org/docs/CommandGuide/Foo.html`.

Checking links
==============

The reachability of external links in the documentation can be checked by
running:

    cd llvm/docs/
    sphinx-build -b linkcheck . _build/lintcheck/
    # report will be generated in _build/lintcheck/output.txt

Doxygen page Output
==============

Install doxygen <https://www.doxygen.nl/download.html> and dot2tex <https://dot2tex.readthedocs.io/en/latest>.

    cd <build-dir>
    cmake -DLLVM_ENABLE_DOXYGEN=On <llvm-top-src-dir>
    make doxygen-llvm # for LLVM docs
    make doxygen-clang # for clang docs

It will generate html in

    <build-dir>/docs/doxygen/html # for LLVM docs
    <build-dir>/tools/clang/docs/doxygen/html # for clang docs