# Melior
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Melior is the MLIR bindings for Rust. It aims to provide a simple,
safe, and complete API for MLIR with a reasonably sane ownership model
represented by the type system in Rust.
This crate is a wrapper of [the MLIR C API](https://mlir.llvm.org/docs/CAPI/).
## Examples
### Building a function to add integers
```rust
use melior::{
Context,
dialect::{arith, DialectRegistry, func},
ir::{*, attribute::{StringAttribute, TypeAttribute}, r#type::FunctionType},
utility::register_all_dialects,
};
let registry = DialectRegistry::new();
register_all_dialects(®istry);
let context = Context::new();
context.append_dialect_registry(®istry);
context.load_all_available_dialects();
let location = Location::unknown(&context);
let module = Module::new(location);
let index_type = Type::index(&context);
module.body().append_operation(func::func(
&context,
StringAttribute::new(&context, "add"),
TypeAttribute::new(FunctionType::new(&context, &[index_type, index_type], &[index_type]).into()),
{
let block = Block::new(&[(index_type, location), (index_type, location)]);
let sum = block.append_operation(arith::addi(
block.argument(0).unwrap().into(),
block.argument(1).unwrap().into(),
location
));
block.append_operation(func::r#return( &[sum.result(0).unwrap().into()], location));
let region = Region::new();
region.append_block(block);
region
},
&[],
location,
));
assert!(module.as_operation().verify());
```
## Install
```sh
cargo add melior
```
### Dependencies
[LLVM/MLIR 19](https://llvm.org/) needs to be installed on your system. On Linux and macOS, you can install it via [Homebrew](https://brew.sh).
```sh
brew install llvm@19
```
## Documentation
On [GitHub Pages](https://mlir-rs.github.io/melior/melior/).
## Contribution
Contribution is welcome! But, Melior is still in the alpha stage as well as the MLIR C API. Note that the API is unstable and can have breaking changes in the future.
### Technical notes
- We always use `&T` for MLIR objects instead of `&mut T` to mitigate the intricacy of representing a loose ownership model of the MLIR C API in Rust.
- Only UTF-8 is supported as string encoding.
- Most string conversion between Rust and C is cached internally.
### Naming conventions
- `Mlir<X>` objects are named `<X>` if they have no destructor. Otherwise, they are named `<X>` for owned objects and `<X>Ref` for borrowed references.
- `mlir<X>Create` functions are renamed as `<X>::new`.
- `mlir<X>Get<Y>` functions are renamed as follows:
- If the resulting objects refer to `&self`, they are named `<X>::as_<Y>`.
- Otherwise, they are named just `<X>::<Y>` and may have arguments, such as position indices.
### Safety
Although Melior aims to be completely type safe, some part of the current API is
not.
- Access to operations, types, or attributes that belong to dialects not
loaded in contexts can lead to runtime errors or segmentation faults in
the worst case.
- Fix plan: Load all dialects by default on creation of contexts, and
provide unsafe constructors of contexts for advanced users.
- IR object references returned from functions that move ownership of
arguments might get invalidated later.
- This is because we need to borrow `&self` rather than `&mut self` to
return such references.
- e.g. `Region::append_block()`
- Fix plan: Use dynamic check, such as `RefCell`, for the objects.
## References
- The raw C binding generation depends on [mlir-rs/mlir-sys](https://github.com/mlir-rs/mlir-sys).
- The overall design is inspired by [TheDan64/inkwell](https://github.com/TheDan64/inkwell).
## License
[Apache 2.0](https://github.com/mlir-rs/melior/blob/main/LICENSE)