Go bindings to system LLVM

This library provides bindings to a system-installed LLVM.

Currently supported:

• LLVM 22, 21, 20, 19, 18, 17, 16, 15 and 14 from apt.llvm.org on Debian/Ubuntu.
• LLVM 22, 21, 20, 19, 18, 17, 16, 15 and 14 from Homebrew on macOS.
• LLVM 22, 21, 20, 19, 18, 17, 16, 15 and 14 in an MSYS2 MINGW64 environment on Windows (see the setup below).
• Any of the above versions with a manually built LLVM through the byollvm build tag. You need to set up CFLAGS/LDFLAGS etc yourself in this case.

You can select the LLVM version using a build tag, for example -tags=llvm17 to use LLVM 17.

Usage

If you have a supported LLVM installation, you should be able to do a simple go get:

go get github.com/xgo-dev/llvm

You can use build tags to select a LLVM version. For example, use -tags=llvm15 to select LLVM 15. Setting a build tag for a LLVM version that is not supported will be ignored.

Windows (MSYS2 MINGW64)

The Windows bindings expect pkg-config metadata named after the selected LLVM major version, such as llvm-19. After installing a MinGW-compatible LLVM, mingw-w64-x86_64-gcc, and mingw-w64-x86_64-pkgconf in a MINGW64 environment, generate that file from llvm-config:

pc_dir="$PWD/.llvm-pkgconfig"
mkdir -p "$pc_dir"
llvm_version="$(llvm-config --version)"
llvm_major="${llvm_version%%.*}"
case "$llvm_major" in
  14|15|16|17|18|19|20|21|22) ;;
  *) echo "unsupported LLVM version: $llvm_version" >&2; exit 1 ;;
esac
cflags="$(llvm-config --cflags | tr '\r\n' '  ')"
# Normalize the release build machine's zstd path and link winpthread.
ldflags="$(llvm-config --ldflags --libs all --system-libs | tr '\r\n' '  ' | sed -E 's#[^[:space:]]*/mingw64/lib/libzstd\.dll\.a#-lzstd#g') -lwinpthread"
printf '%s\n' \
  "Name: LLVM $llvm_major" \
  "Description: LLVM $llvm_major host compiler and linker flags" \
  "Version: $llvm_version" \
  "Cflags: $cflags" \
  "Libs: $ldflags" \
  > "$pc_dir/llvm-$llvm_major.pc"
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH="$(cygpath -m "$pc_dir")"
export CC=gcc CXX=g++ CGO_ENABLED=1
go test -tags="llvm$llvm_major"

The Windows CI job in .github/workflows/go.yml shows the exact LLVM versions and SHA-256 checksums used by this project.

License

These LLVM bindings for Go originally come from LLVM, but they have since been removed. Still, they remain under the same license as they were originally, which is the Apache License 2.0 (with LLVM exceptions). Check upstream LLVM for detailed copyright information.

This README, the backports* files, and the Makefile are separate from LLVM but are licensed under the same license.