TheDan64/inkwell

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

3006 stars · 273 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

Inkwell is a Rust library providing a safe, strongly-typed wrapper around llvm-sys for building compilers and JIT engines. It mirrors LLVM IR's type system so many errors are caught at compile time rather than at LLVM runtime.

Use cases

• build a programming language compiler in Rust
• generate LLVM IR from Rust code
• create a JIT compiler for a DSL
• safely interface with LLVM from Rust
• compile custom bytecode to native code
• implement a language backend targeting LLVM

When to choose

• you are writing a compiler or language implementation in Rust
• you want compile-time safety over the raw LLVM C API
• you need JIT execution of generated code
• you want better documentation and ergonomics than llvm-sys

When to avoid

• you need a stable 1.0 API since inkwell is pre-1.0 with possible breaking changes
• you are not using Rust
• you need an LLVM version outside 12-22
• you only need a quick one-off codegen script where raw llvm-sys suffices

Facets

library · maturity active

compiler programming-language developer-tools compilers programming-languages developer-tools rust cross-platform llvm codegen jit safe-wrapper llvm-ir

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