Developing a VSCode Extension for LLVM IR analysis

This is a plan. I'll update as I go :)

As a compiler engineer, I have to dive into LLVM IR details to figure out what's wrong with our magical compiler. Sometimes the IR file (.ll) is extremely compilcated (up to 100k lines), especially when I'm dealing with Debug Info. A common scenario is that the content of a metadata node attached to an instruction, locates at the very end of the .ll file. I have to jump back and forth frequently in the editor to know what exactly each metadata means, which is super annoying :(

Ah, I use VSCode as the editor bascially because I can't figure out how to exit vim of its remote developement feature. So this is the initial motivation of developing a VSCode Extension to ease the analysis effort on LLVM IR.

The first feature of my VSCode Extension would be showing up a tooltip expanding the metadata definition.

Detailed plan

1. Build llvm-project on my laptop
2. Create a hello-world VSCode Extension
3. ...