Beaker

The Beaker Programming Language.

Dependencies

Beaker has several external dependencies.

• Boost version 1.55 or later.
• Lingo is a library that provides a number of utilities that can be used within various compilers.
• The csll/llvm library provides a lightweight text-based LLVM assembly generator.

Note that Beaker does not depend on LLVM directly because the LLVM flags disable exceptions, which Beaker relies upon heavily.

Building Beaker

After cloning the repository, go into the directory and run:

git submodule update --init --recursive

This will pull the required versions of Lingo into your working directory.

Note that if you have a fork of Beaker, you will need to update the 'lingo' submodule.

git submodule update --remote --merge

The build is configured by CMake.

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make

Running the compiler

The compiler is run by the command beaker. It takes the name of a single input file as an argument:

./beaker input.bkr

If input.bkr has a function named main(), that function is evaluated (main() must not take arguments). Otherwise, the compiler simply prints "no main".

Notes

The Beaker implementation does not (currently) directly depend on Lingo. Eventually, Beaker will depend on the following features in Lingo:

• String formatting
• Node concepts
• Debugging macros
• S-expression debugging

The long-term plan is to migrate a number of features out of Beaker and into Lingo, replacing older, less capable implementations. These are likely to be:

• The symbol table
• Input buffer
• Tokens
• Lexing and parsing
• Generic environments
• ???

Errata

When lowering LLVM to native assembly on new versions of Mac OS X you may need to override the system triple to avoid linker warnings. Invoke llc like this:

llc -mtriple=x86_64-apple-macosx <input>