Coolang

Coolang is a compiler for the COOL language with an LLVM backend.

Building Coolang

Prerequisites

Linux

• CMake 3.10 (or more recent)
• a C++17 compiler
• LLVM 8 and Clang 8
  • see https://apt.llvm.org/
  • you can use the auto-install script they provide if you want, just specify version 8. But you really only need: clang-8, llvm-8, and llvm-8-dev
• also install the libedit-dev package since llvm fails to link if it's not installed

macOS

• CMake 3.10 (or more recent)
• LLVM 8 and Clang 8
  • see https://llvm.org/
  • Homebrew: brew install llvm

Windows

• CMake 3.10 (or more recent)
• Visual studio 2017 (or more recent)
• LLVM 8 and Clang 8
  • Options for how to get Clang 8
    • Download the installer from here and run http://releases.llvm.org/download.html
      • Confusingly, the installer is called LLVM-8.0.1-... but it doesn't install the LLVM development libs, we'll do that later
    • Or if you use the chocolatey package manager:
      • choco install llvm --version=8.0.1
      • this also calls itself LLVM but doesn't include development libs
  • Options for how to get LLVM 8 development libs
    • Download a pre-built binary from here: https://github.com/vovkos/llvm-package-windows/releases/tag/llvm-8.0.0
      • note these are built for Visual Studio 15 and 14 (aka 2017 and 2015) but Visual Studio 2019 (aka 16) can still use them
      • Choose one to download based on your Visual Studio version and compile options (x86, and msvcrt-dbg are default for Visual Studio 2017, for 2019 the defaults are amd64, and msvcrt-dbg)
      • Extract to somewhere CMake will look for packages ("C:\Program Files (x86)" or "C:\Program Files" by default)
    • Or install LLVM using vcpkg
      • Note LLVM is huge and vcpkg will take ~1hour to build and install it even on a fast machine
      • If vcpkg has updated their LLVM version at head to 9 or later you may need to reset your vcpkg client to a previous version that still uses llvm 8, see https://github.com/microsoft/vcpkg/commits/master/ports/llvm
      • later when running CMake you'll need to set your -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE as usual for vcpkg
    • Or build from source and install
      • Same warning as with using vcpkg this will probably take even longer than 1hour

Build and run tests

On windows if you installed a pre-built LLVM binary and it's a "release" version (i.e. doesn't end in -dbg) you'll need to use:

• cmake --build . --config Release instead of cmake --build .
• .\Release\coolang.exe hello.cl instead of .\Debug\coolang.exe hello.cl

$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ cmake ..
$ cmake --build .
$ ctest --verbose

then compile a hello world program

Linux

$ echo "class Main inherits IO { main() : Object { out_string(\"Hello, world\\n\") }; };" > hello.cl
$ ./coolang hello.cl
$ ./hello
Hello, world

macOS

$ echo "class Main inherits IO { main() : Object { out_string(\"Hello, world\\n\") }; };" > hello.cl
$ ./coolang hello.cl
$ ./hello
Hello, world

Windows

$ [IO.File]::WriteAllLines((Join-Path -Path (Resolve-Path .) -ChildPath "hello.cl"), "class Main inherits IO { main() : Object { out_string(`"Hello, world`\n`") }; };")
$ .\Debug\coolang.exe hello.cl
$ .\hello.exe
Hello, world

This is not an official Google product.