🧅 Onion Frontend

The compilation frontend for the Onion programming language. This package handles lexical analysis, parsing, semantic analysis, and intermediate representation generation.

📚 Overview

The onion-frontend package is responsible for transforming Onion source code into intermediate representation (IR) that can be executed by the Onion Virtual Machine. It implements a complete compilation pipeline from source text to executable bytecode.

🏗️ Architecture

Source Code → Lexer → Parser → AST -> Comptime → Analyzer → IR Generator → IR/Bytecode

Components

• Lexer (parser/lexer.rs) - Tokenizes source code into a stream of tokens
• Parser (parser/ast.rs) - Builds Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) from tokens
• Analyzer (parser/analyzer.rs) - Performs semantic analysis and error checking
• IR Generator (ir_generator/) - Generates intermediate representation from AST
• Compiler (compile.rs) - Orchestrates the entire compilation process

✨ Features

• 🔍 Lexical Analysis - Complete tokenization with support for Unicode
• 🌳 AST Generation - Builds structured representation of source code
• 🔎 Semantic Analysis - Type checking and error detection
• 📦 IR Generation - Produces optimized intermediate representation
• 🚀 Bytecode Compilation - Generates executable bytecode for the VM
• 🔧 Error Reporting - Rich error messages with source location information

🏗️ Module Structure

onion-frontend/
├── src/
│   ├── lib.rs              # Public API exports
│   ├── compile.rs          # Main compilation orchestration
│   ├── parser/             # Lexical and syntactic analysis
│   │   ├── comptime/       # Compile-time evaluation and solving
│   │   ├── mod.rs
│   │   ├── lexer.rs        # Tokenization
│   │   ├── ast.rs          # AST construction
│   │   └── analyzer.rs     # Semantic analysis
│   └── ir_generator/       # Intermediate representation
│       ├── mod.rs
│       └── ir_generator.rs # IR generation logic
└── Cargo.toml

🎯 Design Goals

1. Correctness - Comprehensive error checking and validation
2. Performance - Efficient compilation with minimal overhead
3. Extensibility - Modular design for easy feature additions
4. Developer Experience - Clear error messages and debugging support

🤝 Integration

This package is designed to work seamlessly with:

• onion-vm - Executes the generated bytecode
• Language Server - Provides IDE support through compilation services
• CLI Tools - Powers the onion compile command

📄 License

This package is part of the Onion programming language project and is licensed under the MIT License.