Back in 2017, a table was added to the codegen documentation listing
which features various backends support. It received a few updates since
then, but not since the end of 2019. Having such a table is a nice idea,
but it hasn't been kept up to date, it isn't easy to ensure that it is
up to date, and the table probably isn't very discoverable for most
users who would be interested in this information anyway (it would be
better suited to some kind of "what can LLVM do for me?" page).
For all of the above reasons, I believe it makes sense to remove it.
Differential Revision: https://reviews.llvm.org/D129996
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