What is a string? An array of characters.
What is a character? An integer.
So while I'm no LLVM expert by any means, I would guess that if, eg, you wanted to represent some 8-bit character set, you'd use an array of i8 (8-bit integers), or a pointer to i8. And indeed, if we have a simple hello world C program:
#include <stdio.h>
int main() {
puts("Hello, world!");
return 0;
}
And we compile it using llvm-gcc and dump the generated LLVM assembly:
$ llvm-gcc -S -emit-llvm hello.c
$ cat hello.s
; ModuleID = 'hello.c'
target datalayout = "e-p:64:64:64-i1:8:8-i8:8:8-i16:16:16-i32:32:32-i64:64:64-f32:32:32-f64:64:64-v64:64:64-v128:128:128-a0:0:64-s0:64:64-f80:128:128"
target triple = "x86_64-linux-gnu"
@.str = internal constant [14 x i8] c"Hello, world!\00" ; <[14 x i8]*> [#uses=1]
define i32 @main() {
entry:
%retval = alloca i32 ; <i32*> [#uses=2]
%tmp = alloca i32 ; <i32*> [#uses=2]
%"alloca point" = bitcast i32 0 to i32 ; <i32> [#uses=0]
%tmp1 = getelementptr [14 x i8]* @.str, i32 0, i64 0 ; <i8*> [#uses=1]
%tmp2 = call i32 @puts( i8* %tmp1 ) nounwind ; <i32> [#uses=0]
store i32 0, i32* %tmp, align 4
%tmp3 = load i32* %tmp, align 4 ; <i32> [#uses=1]
store i32 %tmp3, i32* %retval, align 4
br label %return
return: ; preds = %entry
%retval4 = load i32* %retval ; <i32> [#uses=1]
ret i32 %retval4
}
declare i32 @puts(i8*)
Notice the reference to the puts function declared at the end of the file. In C, puts is
int puts(const char *s)
In LLVM, it is
i32 @puts(i8*)
The correspondence should be clear.
As an aside, the generated LLVM is very verbose here because I compiled without optimizations. If you turn those on, the unnecessary instructions disappear:
$ llvm-gcc -O2 -S -emit-llvm hello.c
$ cat hello.s
; ModuleID = 'hello.c'
target datalayout = "e-p:64:64:64-i1:8:8-i8:8:8-i16:16:16-i32:32:32-i64:64:64-f32:32:32-f64:64:64-v64:64:64-v128:128:128-a0:0:64-s0:64:64-f80:128:128"
target triple = "x86_64-linux-gnu"
@.str = internal constant [14 x i8] c"Hello, world!\00" ; <[14 x i8]*> [#uses=1]
define i32 @main() nounwind {
entry:
%tmp2 = tail call i32 @puts( i8* getelementptr ([14 x i8]* @.str, i32 0, i64 0) ) nounwind ; <i32> [#uses=0]
ret i32 0
}
declare i32 @puts(i8*)