ezc

Compiler for ez.

This is for an independent study in school.

Goals

• To learn a lot
• ez should resemble english
• Use only rust standard library
• Write a (minimal) working compiler. probably only u64 but maybe arrays
• Write a (minimal) standard library for ez in another language (zig, rust, c, asm, ..)

Instructions

To run just do ezc file use -g flag for debug info (it will generate a out.asm file). then you can open in gdb or lldb

To get the standard library pass -stdlib-path /path/to/stdlib to the compiler. To compile the standard library, go into the lib directory in this compiler. Then run zig build in that directory and find the library in zig-cache/lib/libstd.a. You will probably need pretty close to master branch zig. You can find that here: https://ziglang.org/download/.

To test the code: cargo test To test the generated code you can do cd tests; ./test.sh. Note: this requires gcc.

Dependencies:

• Zig (master). NOTE: If you want to build without zig run HAS_NO_ZIG=1 cargo ...(whatever command you want). This may be useful if you are on a system without zig or want to provide your own standard library.
• nasm
• cargo
• gcc (only for testing)

Resources

• http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/staffpages/r_bornat/books/compiling.pdf - book about compilers
• http://www.egr.unlv.edu/~ed/assembly64.pdf - book about x86-64 assembly
• https://ruslanspivak.com/lsbasi-part1/ - this blog series as a reference to the frontend of a compiler
• godbolt.org - an interactive webpage to explore how compilers work on the backend
• http://tinf2.vub.ac.be/~dvermeir/courses/compilers/compilers.pdf - book about compilers.
• https://github.com/ziglang/zig - source code for another programming language
• http://www.cs.ecu.edu/karl/5220/spr16/Notes/Lexical/finitestate.html - explanation of a lexer as a state machine
• https://llvm.org/docs/tutorial/MyFirstLanguageFrontend/index.html - another tutorial about compilers. it is by the leader in the industry compiler toolchain (llvm)
• http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~pjj/cs2111/ho/node10.html - stack based code generation for expressions
• https://craftinginterpreters.com/ - book about interpreters. could be useful
• https://wiki.osdev.org/System_V_ABI talks about this systemv abi: used for calling conventions. this also does https://wiki.osdev.org/Calling_Conventions

Features

• lexer

• ast (structs for ast items)

• parser

• codegen

• immutable assignments

• mutable variables

• semantic analysis.

• expressions (the start of recursive parsing)

• if statements

• loops

• fancy compile errors (with carets)

• functions

• modules

• char literals

• standard library

• io

• arrays and string literals

• finish blog bost

• finish documentation

• remove all the TODOs