nicole

Toy Compiler written in c++ using LLVM by Evian Concepción Peña

Goals

Combine an user friendly sintax and the speed of a compiled language, example: Mojo (uses MLIR) or Julia WARNING: Currently translation to machine code is commented, to develope faster I use the JIT engine of LLVM

How to build

• At parent directory --> mkdir build
• At parent directory --> cd build
• At build directory --> cmake ..
• At nicole directory --> nicole.sh file.nc
• nicole.sh will compile and excute but only will compile those modified files
• Still no options from command line so test/test1.nc is the program to be compiled

Features Implemented

• Lexer (sintax is up to the users since the parser only knows about token types and not raw information)

• Parsing algorithm is up to users meaning it can easily be changed, for this project I just implement a Top-Down

• Tree visualization

• Literals Bool, Int, Float, Double, Char, String

• Variable Declaration

• Const Variable Declaration

• Auto declaration (still not supported const auto but it is trivial to implement)

• Unary operations -- (decrement), ++ (increment), -, ! (not)

• Binary operations or, and, +, -, *, /, %, !=, ==, <, <=, >, >=

• Operators +=, -=, *=, /=

• Operator precedency and parenthesis expressions

• Variable call

• Function Declaration with return (type / void) and allowing recursion

• Function calls

• If conditional with else as optional

• Ternary operator

• Switch conditional with optional default (still gotta check that every case has the right type)

• Loops while, do while, for

• Every time a function, loop or conditional is being created it inherits the outer scope

• Print in the terminal (by te moment just literal and not user types)

• Import (still gotta check if every path works and more tests about dependency cycles)

• Structures of data (can access either as a getter or to set the attributes after constructor, just missing methods and nested types)

Features yet to implement

• Better error messages

• Vectors / Array

• Classes

• Stop (equivalent to break in c++)

• Pass (equivalent to continue in c++)

• Pointers and null

• Concatenation of expression, example: variable[index][index].method... Right now would require create an intermediate variable

• Standar library

• Type conversion

• Type checking analysis

• Optimization analysis (let the user decide between differnt levels, Default, None, Agressive...)

• System calls

• Threads (not sure)

• Templates (not sure)

• Polymorphism (not sure)

• NameSpace (not sure)

• Use MLIR -> Multi Level Intermediate Representation (not sure)

Folder structure

• The .txt files next to the CMakeLists.txt are just meant for me to install correctly LLVM and the intellisense being able to find the library

• Building system (cmake, in the futute might add Bazel)

• inc for every header file (.h)

  • The folders are divide by stages (since this is an early stage of the project it might not be accurate the file path)
  • 1. Lexical Analysis (has everything related to building a lexer)
  • 2. Parsing Analaysis (has everything related to de parsing, AST nodes, tables)
  • 3. Type checking (not implemnted)
  • 4. Optimization analysis (not implemented)
  • 5. Visitors (Code generation)

• src for every source file (.cc)

• test constains tests for the features of the compiler (expected to use google test library)

• build where the binary is