for educational purposes...
This project is an attempt to build a useful compiler with as few lines of code as possible and no fewer. The goal is to keep it in the thousands, while still having non-trivial features such as nice error messages and optimization passes.
Hopefully, it'll still be extensible after the fact so it can be used as a base for implementing more interesting compiler language features quickly.
- Parser [in progress]
- Type checker/semantic check pass [TODO]
- ANF [in progress]
- Code gen [in progress]
- x86-64 assembler [in progress]
- Optimization passes [TODO]
- Inlining
- Vectorizing
- Dead code removal
I chose Python for this project, because it's a fairly standard language, and the syntax is fairly intuitive to everyone (even if they haven't written Python before). Most compiler resources utilize languages that, frankly are better suited for compiler implementation (I miss my functional pattern matching and sum types), but are also more obscure. It takes some time to learn Haskell or OCaml, and the code isn't as easy for beginners to these languages to grok.
The goal is to keep the code fairly "python conventional" (inspired particularly
by the likes of Norvig, requests, and other python code that minimizes use of OO in
favor of directness)