ljc

Lovejoy compiler for the ARMv8-A AArch64 instruction set.

Code Documentation

Compiler documentation can be found at lovejoy-lang.github.io/ljc. It may also be compiled and browsed locally, see docs/README.md.

Language Specification

See LANGUAGE_SPEC_DRAFT.md

Compiler Usage

In the root of this repository, run make to build ljc,

$ make

then use the generated binary,

$ ./ljc my-source.lj -o my-binary

Tests

$ make test
$ ./ljc_test

Pipeline

• Parse with incremental lexing.
• Macro expansion onto parse tree, spawn new compiler instance for ACE*.
• Generate HIR, similar to AST, closest to source.
• Type checking and semantic analysis.
• Reduce to MIR, mid-level, simplistic closer to machine-code representation.
• Optimizations (TCO, LICM, etc.)
• Peephole optimizations.
• Final translation into ARM machine code.

[Include a graphic here representing pipeline]

Features

Incomplete list of features, most yet to be implemented.

• Minimal, low-level, simple, C inspired.
• ACE (Arbitrary Compile-time Execution) (May require implementing a viritual machine, which could also be used for a REPL).
• Minimal grammar, very few keywords, instead very strong macro system.
• Pattern matching.
• Strong type system, with inference, (exact system to be decided).
• GADTs (Generalized algebraic datatypes), but distinct records and union syntax too (?).
• Fat pointers.
• Closures.
• Overloading.
• First class types and functions.
• Generics and higher kinded types.
• Incremental compilation. (?)
• Safety features (e.g. nullable v. non-nullable pointers).
• Integrated build system, build-configuaration to be written in Lovejoy itself. i.e. no scripts, Makefiles, JSON, TOML, YAML, etc.

Future Goals

• Become self-hosting.

common.h

The common.h and common.c files describe general functions and macros used by this project. For enhanced C syntax highlighting, appropriate to this project, consider using my .vim/after/syntax/c.vim.