Write an IR Pretty-Printer and Round-Trip Parser

Readable IR Aids Debugging

LLVM's -S flag prints human-readable .ll files; GCC dumps GIMPLE with -fdump-tree-ssa. A pretty-printer turns your internal IR into text you can diff, test, and round-trip. Compiler engineers spend hours reading printed IR when optimizations go wrong.

Print and Parse Round-Trip

Walk instructions and emit syntax: t1 = add t2, t3. Labels on their own lines. Functions as named regions. A parser that reads the same format validates your printer and enables file-based test cases.

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• Consistent formatting makes diffs meaningful
• Operand kinds: temp, variable, constant, label
• Round-trip: print then parse equals original
• Pretty output is the primary debug interface for IR bugs

Connecting to real compilers

Production compilers embed this step inside a longer pipeline. GCC flows through cpp, cc1, assembly, and ld; Clang uses the driver, Sema, LLVM IR passes, and a target backend. LLVM bitcode, JVM bytecode, and WASM are other familiar IRs at the same layer. The exercise isolates one pass so you can test it alone before chaining it to the next stage.

Why for this exercise

You will write an IR pretty-printer and optional round-trip parser. This exercise asks you to serialize your instruction list to text and verify that parsed output reconstructs the same structure.