Is there an LLVM backend for Perl?

Question

I have a project written in C which I wish to convert to Perl. A friend of mine suggested to use LLVM. I compiled my C code to LLVM assembly using Clang. Now I'm trying to convert this intermediate representation into Perl but I can't seem to find any backend for it. Would someone point me in the right direction?

Answer 1

1. No, there isn't such a backend. At least not directly. Emscripten converts LLVM IR to Javascript, and maybe you can use something else to convert that to Perl.
2. It's a pretty bad idea for moving a project from one language to another. The code will be completely unreadable and un-maintainable. Either do a honest rewrite or wrap your C as a library with Perl's foreign-function interface tools and use it from Perl.

Answer 2

Converting to Perl is a no go. It hasn't been done because emulating C in Perl would be insanely slow. They have completely different type systems, for starters. However, it's wholly unnecessary to convert the code to Perl to call it from Perl. You can load compiled C code from Perl.

What you'll have to do is tell Perl how to call those C functions. Perl deals with scalars and so on, but C deals with ints and so on. This is done using XS.

perlxstut contains the documentation on how to do all this.